A sugar for congestive heart failure patients.

The incidence of congestive heart failure (CHF) continues to increase worldwide. Approximately 550,000 patients with CHF are newly diagnosed per year in the USA, which adds to the existing 5 million patients currently afflicted with this disease. Furthermore, there are approximately 3.1 million hospital admissions/year for heart failure, costing over US$23 billion (source: www.americanheartassociation.com). There is no cure for CHF and current therapies try to achieve relief of symptoms, improving a patient’s quality of life, and possibly lessening the progression of disease. Various classes of pharmaceuticals, such as diuretics, beta blockers, and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, have been the accepted therapy for CHF [Halawa, 1999]. These mainstream pharmaceuticals focus on lowering systolic and diastolic blood pressure, control of ventricular rate for atrial fibrillation, and decrease volume overload [Baliga and Young, 2008]. Acute achievement of these parameters can occur; however, chronic control is usually not maintained due to the progression of disease.