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A drug that is commonly used for treating patients with heart failure does very little when it comes to lowering cardiac arrest or minimizing risk for death among those people diagnosed with the common heart problem. However, this drug does very little to reduce hospitalizations according to the findings of a recently completed study.

The study mainly looked at patients of heart failure and whose hearts were still having normal contractions or the contractions were near normal. The researchers reported that these patients accounted for about 40% of cases of heart failure recorded. As of now, no drugs are available for ensuring that these patients have improved prognoses as far as the findings of this study are concerned.

How the research was conducted

During the research, over 3400 patients from six different countries who had been diagnosed with heart failure were enrolled. These patients essentially had an ejection fraction of the left ventricular that was 45% or more. As of now, there are no drugs used for improving the prognoses of such patients as far as what the study authors said is concerned.

The patients participating in the research were assigned to receive between 15 mg and 45 mg per day of Aldactone/ spironolactone or an inactive form of placebo. The assigning was actually done randomly and the researchers followed them for a period of a little more than three years. People with heart failure are given spironolactone since it assists in eliminating the excess fluid out of the body which is responsible for making it rather difficult for the heart to pump blood around and in fact ends up lowering blood pressure.

Spironolactone effectiveness in treating heart failure

Those carrying out the research were interested in seeing the number of patients who had become hospitalized due to heart failure, had survived a cardiac arrest or end up dying due to a condition related to heart- whichever had occurred first. Actually, these particular events were present in about 18.6% of patients who had taken spironolactone and 20.4% for those patients having the placebo group.

Upon examining the outcomes of the research separately, those patients who had taken the drug actually were hospitalized less compared to those who had taken the placebo. This was 12% compared to 14.2%. According to the researchers, this study showed how spironolactone was effective in minimizing cases of hospitalizations for the population having heart failure cases. In addition to this, the study also helped a lot in giving the researchers some ideas as to how future studies of heart failure should be conducted. Such studies would contribute greatly in assisting researchers come up with ways in which death rates resulting from heart failure would be reduced.

The US National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute funded the study which aimed at proving more insights into helping heart failure patients.