Novel drugs — some old, some new — may offer patients fresh ways to reduce their heart risks beyond the usual medicines that lower cholesterol and blood pressure. Several experimental drugs also showed early promise for interfering with heart-harmful genes while leaving the genes themselves intact. The first few of these “RNA-interference” drugs recently were approved for other conditions, and research is also targeting heart disease. It was tested in 1,561 people with heart disease from clogged arteries who still had high LDL, the bad form of cholesterol, despite taking standard drugs. AstraZeneca’s Farxiga, originally developed to treat diabetes, also lowered the risk of heart problems in heart failure patients who did not have diabetes.

Source: Los Angeles Times November 18, 2019 23:15 UTC