Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Heart disease is a major cause of illness, disability, and death in Canada. In turn, heart disease increases personal, community and health care costs. Up to 2% of our population is affected by heart failure. This costs between $1.4 and $2.3 billion in Canada each year. It is therefore imperative that we find new ways to treat heart disease. We are focusing on abnormal growth of the heart. This is called cardiac hypertrophy. Cardiac hypertrophy is a convergent point that links various risk factors to heart failure. These risk factors include high blood pressure, heart attack, and valve disease. With time, if allowed to progress, this abnormal growth or cardiac hypertrophy leads to heart failure. Thus, control of hypertrophy is an important goal in the prevention of heart failure. This project focuses on the endocannabinoid system (ECS) in the heart. There are two majow ECS pathways - the CB1 receptor and the CB2 receptor pathway. Althogh abundant evidence shows that activation of the ECS can protect the heart, ES-based therapies have been problematic due to the psychoactive CB1 side effects. Thus, to avoid these adverse effects, we will investigate whether a drug that targets only the CB2 pathway has potential to prevent the development of heart failure.