Viagra 'may prevent heart attack'

Posted on 2008-08-26 20:00:00 in Cardio-Vascular | Drug Trends | Stroke |

Researchers at Queen's University in Canada conducting a study into regulating a single enzyme may have made a scientific breakthrough, it has been suggested.

In news that may be of interest to anti-aging physicians, professor of pharmacology and toxicology Donald Maurice and his team believe their findings may lead to new drug therapies that could potentially prevent heart attacks and strokes.

Published on the online pages of the international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the enzyme PDE5 that was targeted is responsible for the regulation of platelets.

However, drugs such as Viagra are known to inhibit the enzyme, although it had not been previously possible to isolate the specific pool of activity.

Author and PHD student Lindsay Wilson said: "Understanding how the cell works should allow us to affect the activity of enzymes in one neighborhood - and leave alone their 'identical twins' in a different neighborhood in that cell."

In related news, the onset of sexual dysfunction in adults is not "inevitably" a part of the aging process, researchers at the University of Chicago have claimed.
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