Dr James Januzzi MD., Hutter Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Cardiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, talks about the main objectives and key findings from his research about NT-proBNP in Type 2 Diabetes patients (T2DM) conducted using the biorepository from the CANagliflozin cardioVascular Assessment Study (CANVAS) program.
In the CANVAS program, Canagliflozin, which is a sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitor that reduces blood glucose, as well as blood pressure, body weight, and albuminuria in T2DM patients, was found to reduce adverse cardiovascular events and had a particularly profound impact on heart failure events, including hospitalization.1
This led to an interest in studying biomarkers and their potential to identify cardiovascular risk in T2DM patients as well as their potential to predict the benefits of Canagliflozin for these patients.
The CANVAS study included NT-proBNP measurements, the gold-standard biomarker for detecting heart failure in patients, at baseline, 1 year and 6 years and was used to evaluate both of these theories.
One major finding from the research indicates that patients with T2DM are at high risk for the onset of heart failure and subsequent complications which usually go undetected. Another major finding showed that treatment with Canagliflozin lowered NT-proBNP concentrations at subsequent measurements.
These findings imply a lowered risk of heart failure in the future and better quality of life for T2DM patients receiving treatment with Canagliflozin.
While Canagliflozin reduced the risk of cardiovascular events in patients across a wide spectrum in the CANVAS study, patients with elevated NT-proBNP levels (at baseline) had very large reductions in their risk of developing heart failure.
This means that NT-proBNP can also be used to identify patients who would gain the most from being placed on a novel therapy like Canagliflozin.