Dr John McMurray: Dapagliflozin Excels as a Preventive and Established Treatment for Heart Failure

Dapagliflozin was shown to not only benefit patients at risk of heart failure, both with and without diabetes, but treat patients with established heart failure as well, said John McMurray, MD, FRCP, FESC, professor of medical cardiology in the Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences at the University of Glasgow.

Transcript

Given the benefits that DAPA-HF revealed in preventing the worsening of heart failure in patients without diabetes, what is the potential role of dapagliflozin in primary prevention?

Dapagliflozin has 2 key roles when it comes to thinking about heart failure. The first is we have very strong evidence that dapagliflozin, and the whole SGLT2 inhibitor family, reduce the risk of incident heart failure. So, if you’ve got type 2 diabetes, 1 of the major risks you face is developing heart failure, and dapagliflozin, like other SGLT2 inhibitors, unequivocally reduces that risk substantially. What's new is that we now know that dapagliflozin is also a treatment for established heart failure. So, moving from prevention to treatment, we can treat patients with heart failure both with and without type 2 diabetes.