Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in people with diabetes, and risk for heart failure—where the heart can’t pump enough blood—is two to three times higher in men and up to five times higher in women with diabetes compared to people without diabetes.
In the case of heart failure, diabetes presents another problem: Some of the therapies that treat diabetes may actually make heart failure worse.
But new research from the University of Iowa and the University of California at Davis finds that two different drugs—a beta blocker and an antidepressant—might both have potential for preventing or treating heart failure by blocking an insulin signaling pathway in the heart muscle.