No benefit of additional treatment with exenatide in patients with an acute myocardial infarction

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Exenatide, published as a randomized controlled trial.

This double blinded, placebo controlled randomized clinical trial studies the effect of exenatide on myocardial infarct size.

The glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist exenatide has possible cardioprotective properties during reperfusion after primary percutaneous coronary intervention for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was performed to determine infarct size, area at risk (AAR) (using T2-weighted hyperintensity (T2W) and late enhancement endocardial surface area (ESA)).

Who Took Part

The study group was 191 patients.

PubMed indexes the participants as middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

Patients with a previous myocardial infarction, Trombolysis in Myocardial Infarction flow 2 or 3, multi-vessel disease, or diabetes were excluded.

How the Study Was Run

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

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Exenatide and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Blinding on both sides kept the patients and researchers unaware of who received Exenatide.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Exenatide group a baseline to be compared against.

The primary endpoint was of 4-month final infarct size, corrected for the AAR measured in the acute phase using MRI.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Exenatide, Myocardial Infarction, Peptides, Percutaneous Coronary Intervention, Venoms and Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists.

Author keywords: Coronary artery disease and Infarct size.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Exenatide in 191 patients.

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2016 (International journal of cardiology), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the Exenatide compound page, all human trials.