Grant: Operating Grant

Heart attacks resulting in dead and damaged tissue within the heart are the most common cause of premature death in the developed world. Major advances in medicine have reduced the number of people that die immediately after a heart attack; however, the death rate due to heart failure - a gradual disease in which a person's heart eventually cannot pump enough blood to sustain the body - in the years following a heart attack or other heart injury remains high. In fact, of people who are diagnosed with heart failure, 30-40 percent will die within one year. New methods to understand why the heart fails, and to improve diagnosis and treatment of the disease, are urgently needed to improve this situation. Recently, evidence has suggested that metabolic changes (i.e. changes in the way the heart produces chemical energy from the fuel sources from our diet) contribute to tissue damage and the progression towards heart failure. There is some evidence that drugs that make metabolism more efficient can improve the heart failure patient's chances of survival and quality of life. We propose to develop a new, non-invasive imaging method to measure these metabolic abnormalities typical of the failing heart, that in future could be used in patients with heart disease. The hypothesis to be tested in this project is that the metabolic imaging data obtained with the new imaging method will clearly show the changes in the way the heart produces chemical energy in diseased hearts. The ultimate goal of this work will be to show that our new way to image metabolism in the heart can be used to identify the patients whose symptoms of heart failure will improve with metabolic therapy, thus improving these patients' chances of survival.