A Viagra-like medication could turn around heart failure

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New research in sheep shows that a drug that doctors usually prescribe for the treatment of erectile dysfunction can also treat heart failure.
In people with heart failure, the heart muscle becomes unable to pump out blood efficiently, meaning that some organs may not receive the amount of oxygen that they need to function properly.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) note that 5.7 million adults in the United States have heart failure and that approximately half of the people with this condition die within about 5 years of receiving their diagnosis.
Moreover, research that Cardiac Failure Review published in 2017 argued that there is a "global pandemic" of heart failure, with this condition affecting an estimated 26 million people worldwide.
Such numbers suggest that finding new ways to treat heart failure is a priority for specialists who study this condition.
Recently, Prof. Andrew Trafford led a team of researchers from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom who found that a drug that doctors typically use to treat erectile dysfunction could also treat systolic heart failure, in which the heart's left ventricle loses the ability to contract as normal.
The findings of the new study, which the researchers conducted in sheep, appeared today in the journal Scientific Reports.

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