Short-term angiopeptin therapy and the incidence of graft vessel disease after heart transplantation.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Somatostatin and Heart Transplantation, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Graft vessel disease, the major limitation for long-term success after heart transplantation, is triggered by injury to the graft vessel endothelium, resulting in the expression of adhesion molecules, the migration of leukocytes into the graft, and the release of growth factors.

Angiopeptin, a stable analog of somatostatin, is a growth-hormone inhibitor with additional anti-proliferative effects.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults, middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

Thirty-one patients received treatment with either angiopeptin (n = 13) or placebo (n = 18).

Patients were randomized according to the presence of hypercholesterolemia, recipient cytomegalovirus-antibody status, and donor age.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Somatostatin group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Somatostatin, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Somatostatin could be set against what happens without it.

All patients received standard triple-drug immunosuppression.

Baseline angiography was performed within the first 4 post-operative weeks and annually thereafter.

Twenty-three patients each underwent an additional intracoronary ultrasound.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Graft Rejection, Graft Survival, Heart Transplantation, Oligopeptides, Peptides, Cyclic, Postoperative Period and Preoperative Care.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Somatostatin and Heart Transplantation.

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2002 (The Journal of heart and lung transplantation : the official publication of the International Society for Heart Transplantation), a journal based in United States.

More context: the related Somatostatin library page, all human trials.