A stiff heart muscle, or ‘diastolic heart failure’, is difficult to recognize and virtually impossible to treat. A group of Maastricht researchers has received a large grant to investigate, together with colleagues from Scotland and Germany, what is going on at the molecular level. The hundreds of patients with this form of heart failure who have been monitored at Maastricht UMC+ since 2015 are invaluable to this project. Researcher Judith Cosemans and cardiologist Vanessa van Empel are happy to talk about it.
Diastolic heart failure is a variant of heart failure in which the heart muscle is thicker and stiffer than normal. The heart usually still pumps well, but cannot fill sufficiently with blood. A ‘stiff heart’ initially causes no or only mild complaints and because the pump function is still fine, it is difficult to make the correct diagnosis. Cardiologist Vanessa van Empel has been paying a lot of attention to this patient group at Maastricht UMC+ for a number of years. Since 2015, she has been extensively mapping people with diastolic heart failure, for example by measuring lung function, numerous blood values and the level of effort that someone can still perform. “This holistic approach, in which we do not just focus on the heart, provides a much more complete picture and we also follow people for a longer period of time. This means we also know how often they are admitted to hospital, with what complaints and more.”
Unique cohort
More than six hundred patients are already in this ‘cohort’, which is unique in the Netherlands, perhaps even in the world. “I started it out of interest. These patients are often sent from pillar to post in a hospital because it is such a difficult condition to recognize. We still have little to offer them in terms of treatment. Recently, there is one pill, an SGLT2 inhibitor, that also works for this type of heart failure: better quality of life, fewer hospital admissions, but that also means that we have to make even more effort to recognize this special form of heart failure.”
The ultimate dream of both doctors and scientists is of course to prevent people from developing heart failure. More and better forms of treatment would also be nice. To take such big steps in patient care, you always have to start small. Very small, says researcher Judith Cosemans. She has been working at Maastricht University for years on molecular research into diseases in which platelets may play a role.
