Heart Failure Improved with Pycogenol and CoQ10 mix, Study Shows

Those living with heart failure have an interesting new potential addition to their treatment regimen… the potent antioxidants Pycnogenol and CoQ10. While the use of CoQ10 with heart failure has been getting kicked around for a while (it is an extremely common therapy for congestive heart failure in Japan), the addition of pycnogenol (which we’ve talked about quite a bit on this site) seems to make for a potent one-two punch.

It seems this way because of a recent study in which researchers studied the effects of a pycnogenol/CoQ10 combo used as an adjunct (additional therapy) to a standard treatment regimen for those with congestive heart failure.  This sort of experimental design is nice, because you’re not withholding treatment from anybody… you essentially find a bunch of people who are doing the standard therapy, split them in two, and give half of them a little something extra (rather than give one group a treatment, the other a placebo, and sit back and cackle evilly as you wait to see if the sugar pill group dies).

First a quick overview of the condition, and then we’ll go over the study in detail.

Congestive Heart Failure

CHF or just plain old “heart failure” is pretty much what is sounds like… a condition in which the heart isn’t able to keep up with the demands on it.  It isn’t sudden like a heart attack; it’s a slow, grinding sort of process, in which the heart keeps trying and trying to keep up, but lags behind just a little bit.

Don’t forget, the heart has to push your blood forward against an already existing pressure from the fluid that’s sitting just in front of the valves.  If the heart is damaged, or perhaps has some issues with the valves being damaged, it may not be able to move that blood around as well, and so fluid tends to accumulate in various areas as the blood flow starts to stagnate.

For example, one sign of heart failure is swelling in the lower legs, since the heart can’t push that fluid back up the legs (against gravity) to the torso to be dealt with properly.  It’s called distal edema (edema just means swelling, distal just means further away from the torso), or if it gets really bad, pitting edema (because if you push it in with your finger it stays dented in for a bit).

It tends to get worse over time, at varying rates, depending on the patient.  As the heart tries harder and harder to pump enough blood through the system, it starts to enlarge, like a bodybuilder’s bicep.  This can make the underlying cause even worse.

For example, if it’s a faulty heart valve that’s caused all this mess to start with, as the heart enlarges, the valves will be spread out more, making it even harder for those valves to come back together and form a seal… leading to more leakage, which makes the job of the heart harder, which leads to more heart failure, which makes the heart get bigger, which makes the valves spread out even more… you’re getting the picture.

Of course, exertion becomes harder and harder, to the point where the patient can be exhausted even at rest.  The swelling can start to occur in the abdomen or around/inside the lungs.  Overall, this is a condition that causes a massive decrease in quality of life, as well as posing a risk of mortality.

Depressing, hunh?  Okay, now for the good news.

Pycnogenol and CoQ10 Help Heart Failure

In this study, the researchers took a bunch of people with fairly advanced heart failure, and gave half of them a Pycnogenol and CoQ10 supplement in addition to their regular treatment.  The other half got a placebo in additon to their regular treatment.  This went on for twelve weeks.

What they found was encouraging.  Blood pressure was reduced in the pycnogenol group.  Heart ejection fraction (that’s a measure of how much blood you squirt out of your heart on each beat) increased in the pycogenol group by nearly 25% compared to only about 4% in the placebo group.  That’s a pretty obvious sign of heart failure improvement.

Further, the pycnogenol and CoQ10 group had an increase in their walking distance (remember, people with advanced heart failure have trouble even just walking what most people would think of as a trivial distance) and also a reduction in distal edema (that’s the swelling of the legs we mentioned earlier).  The placebo group… not so much.

The first thing this study tells me is that conventional treatment of heart failure, by itself, doesn’t accomplish very much.  However, with the addition of the potent antioxidants Pycnogenol and CoQ10, some real progress starts to get made.

How Antioxdidants Help Heart Failure

So how come?  What’s so great about Pycnogenol and Co Q10 that people are seeing such a significant benefit with their heart failure symptoms?

First off, there’s CoQ10.  Like any other antioxidant, it protects the cells of the body from damage caused by toxins or toxic metabolic by-products (more on how antioxidants work here).  However, in the case of CoQ10, it seems to do its best work in the area of the mitochondria, which are the power generators of the cell.  As you can imagine, since the heart keeps beating, beating, beating (we hope), it uses up a ton of energy, so the mitochondria are extra important to a heart muscle cell.  Protect the generator from rusting, basically speaking, and the cell can keep doing its work without trouble.

Plus, CoQ10 pulls double duty and is also used inside of that mitochondria (cell generator) as a chemical used in the actual production of energy for the cell.  So it’s almost like a self-cleaning fuel additive (experts will find that metaphor a bit strained, but hey, it’s close enough). For more on how CoQ10 helps generate energy, there’s this article on CoQ10 and statins or this video on the benefits of CoQ10.

Since heart failure is basically a tuckered-out, overworked heart failing due to chronic fatigue, anything that supports energy production in the heart cells is going to be helpful.  Makes sense, right?

Now let’s talk Pycnogenol.  This extra-powerful antioxidant has a well-documented and interesting side effect beyond protecting the cells from toxins:  it seems to keep arteries elastic.

Keeps what, hunh? you ask.  Your arteries aren’t just static, inflexible, glorified garden hoses.  Quite the contrary.  Each one is surrounded by a circular smooth muscle wall that contracts or relaxes to make the hole in the middle bigger or smaller (according to the changing needs for blood flow in that area).  They’re surprisingly responsive… or at least, they’re supposed to be.

Years of a typical American crap-food diet tends to make those responsive, springy, flexible arteries turn into stiff, lazy, inefficient lumps.  And if the downstream delivery system for your blood isn’t very responsive, that means the heart has to push that much harder to get blood where it needs to go… contributing to exhausting what may be an already failing heart.

On the other hand, responsive arteries will not only make the heart’s job easier, but it will feed the heart more effectively as well… the heart has a blood supply too!  That may seem weird… there’s tons of blood shooting through the middle of the heart, after all… but the heart itself is fed by a system of coronary arteries.  These are the guys that get clogged up and trigger a heart attack for those of us who love bacon just a little too much.  As you can imagine, the more pliable and responsive these arteries are, the better the blood flow to your heart, which will combat the effects of fatigue and overworking. Read more on antioxidants and elastic arteries.

So, it’s probably not too surprising that a combination of these two antioxidants can help in the treatment of congestive heart failure.  What is surprising, is that it isn’t used more often!  So if you or someone you know is having troubles with CHF, tell your doctor about this study (a link to the official study is supplied below) and give yourself the best chance possible for recovery!

Stay healthy!

Article source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20657530