Food supplement could help reduce heart deaths
A cheap food supplement available over the counter could help increase the survival of patients with heart disease, according to scientists.
Researchers claim that patients who took the supplement, known as Coenzyme Q10, alongside their normal medication during a two-year study had lower levels of mortality than those who did not.
They say that doctors should now consider including the supplement, which costs around 25 pence per tablet, as part of the treatment of heart disease patients.
The supplement, also known as CoQ10, occurs naturally in the body and plays a role in turning sugar into energy for the cells.
Heart muscle contains large amounts of CoQ10, but previous research has shown that it decreases in patients who have suffered heart failure.
The new study, which involved 420 patients who had suffered heart failure, showed that those who took three 10mg tablets of CoQ10 a day had lower levels of heart failure two years later.
Fewer of the patients who had taken the supplement had died at the end of the study.
Professor Svend Mortensen, from the Heart Centre at Copenhagen University Hospital, who led the study, said: "The CoQ10 treated patients had reduced hospital admission rates for worsening heart failure and lower cardiovascular death, both of which may reflect a significant improvement in cardiac function.
“CoQ10 should be considered as a part of the maintenance therapy of patients with chronic heart failure.”
The results were presented at Heart Failure 2013 – the main annual meeting of the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology – in Lisbon, Portugal.
It is also found in foods such as red meat and fish, but at very low levels that deemed to be insufficient to impact on heart failure.
The molecule is known to play an essential role in the mitochondria, the tiny power stations found inside almost every cell of the body that convert sugar into energy.
The new study, known as the Q-SYMBIO trial, followed patients in Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, India, Malaysia and Australia.
After two years, 14 per cent of patients taking CoQ10 had suffered problems with their heart compared to 25 per cent of those who had been taking a placebo.
Just nine per cent of the patients taking CoQ10 had died compared to 17 per cent taking the placebo.
CoQ10 is currently sold over the counter at pharmacists, including Boots, as an energy booster.
Statins, one of the main drugs taken by heart failure patients to control cholesterol, is also known to block the synthesis of CoQ10 in the body, causing levels to drop.
It is unclear how many of the patients in the study were taking statins and the CoQ10 could have been compensating for this effect in the study.
But Professor Mortensen said he hoped to conduct a trial to see how taking CoQ10 with statins could improve heart patient mortality rates compared to just taking statins alone.
He added: "Statins reduce CoQ10, and circulating CoQ10 prevents the oxidation of LDL effectively, so I think ischemic patients should supplement statin therapy with CoQ10.
"Food supplements can influence the effect of other medications including anticoagulants and patients should seek advice from their doctor before taking them."
Helen Williams, a consultant pharmacist for cardiovascular disease at NHS Southwark Clinical Commissioning Group and a member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, said: "this is a relatively small study for a cardiovascular trial.
"We have often been misled before by small studies that fail to show benefits when extended to larger numbers of patients, so I would great these results with cautious optimism."
