Sex differences in cardiovascular illnesses are becoming more well-acknowledged, although women are under-represented in clinical studies. Pre-menopausal women have a decreased risk of coronary artery diseases with lower vulnerability to ischemic heart damage and heart failure due to a lower ejection fraction, which reduces postmenopausal complications. Researchers created a two-hit model of HFpEF, which revealed that females with diabetes and HFpEF have more severe diastolic dysfunction.
In the present study, published in Cardiovascular Research , researchers investigated the impact of aldosterone infection in db/db mice on HFpEF, focusing on sex differences and alterations in intracellular calcium handling and cardiomyocyte electrophysiology. They also investigated sex-specific responses to medications such as empagliflozin, vericiguat, and calcium or calmodulin-based kinase II to facilitate clinical translation. The researchers used adult wild-type (WT) and Leprdb/db C57BL/6J mice for analysis.
They carried out transthoracic echocardiography, electrophysiological, intracellular calcium (Ca2+) imaging, and protein analysis. They implanted osmotic minipumps subcutaneously in the murine animals to continuously infuse 0.3 μg/hour of D-aldosterone or saline mixed with 5.
0% ethanol over four weeks. The team block-randomized the animals using a block size of four (per gender, genotype, and treatment) with 24 controls (vehicle + wild-type mice), 24 aldosterone-infused db/db mice,.
