Sugar Excess May Damage Heart

Too much sugar can set people down a pathway to heart failure, according to a study from researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (Texas, USA).  Heinrich Taegtmeyer and colleagues report that a single small molecule, the glucose metabolite glucose 6-phosphate (G6P), causes stress to the heart that changes the muscle proteins and induces poor pump function leading to heart failure, as demonstrated by an animal model as well in tissue taken from patients at the Texas Heart Institute. In that G6P can accumulate from eating too much starch and/or sugar, the study authors “implicate a critical role for G6P in load-induced mTOR activation and [endoplasmic reticulum] stress,” proposing that: “glucose metabolic changes precede and regulate functional (and possibly also structural) remodeling of the heart.”