Obesity and heart function

Obesity is a major public health problem, which is growing so rapidly in our societies that it is now referred to as an “obesity epidemic” (see this article on the subject). Obesity is a significant risk factor for many cardiovascular diseases, including heart failure (HF) and especially heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Heart failure is the inability of the heart to supply enough blood to deliver oxygen to tissues while maintaining normal filling pressures. People with HFpEF account for about half of people with heart failure, with the other half living with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF). In the United States, more than 80% of patients with HFpEF are overweight (BMI between 25 and 30) or obese (BMI > 30), twice as many as the general population. Obesity is now a risk factor for HFpEF almost as significant as hypertension. Yet hypertension has received much more attention to date than obesity as a cause of HFpEF.

The mechanisms by which obesity leads to HFpEF are multiple: cardiac overload, systemic inflammation, renal retention, insulin resistance, and alterations in cellular metabolism. The direct effects of obesity on heart muscle cells have recently become the subject of interesting studies. Studies published to date suggest that the accumulation of lipids in the heart has toxic effects that promote cardiac dysfunction in obese people. Obesity is normally associated with a decrease in the heart’s energy metabolism, but it is not clear how the heart adapts to cope with this energy deficit.

A study published in 2020 in the journal Circulation makes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between obesity and cardiac energy metabolism. The researchers recruited 80 volunteers who had no known cardiovascular disease, including 35 non-obese people (BMI: 24 ± 3 kg/m²) and 45 obese people (BMI: 35 ± 5 kg/m²). All participants were subjected to a battery of tests before and after the nutritional intervention with obese participants only, which aimed to make them lose weight. Among the various tests performed, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMR) was used to assess cardiac function, abdominal visceral fat volume and in the liver, conventional phosphorus (³¹P) NMR spectroscopy was used to measure phosphocreatine and ATP (energy sources) at rest, and a more sophisticated variant of phosphorus NMR spectroscopy, called “³¹P saturation transfer”, was used to evaluate the enzymatic kinetics of creatine kinase, the enzyme that allows the rapid formation of ATP from phosphocreatine in muscle cells (ADP + phosphocreatine + H⁺ → ATP + creatine).

The study showed that obese participants had on average a phosphocreatine/ATP ratio 14% lower than non-obese participants, but that the total ATP supply delivered to the heart muscle was preserved by a compensatory mechanism that involves acceleration of the enzymatic reaction catalyzed by creatine kinase. Indeed, the resting creatine kinase catalytic constant, k_f^CKrest was 33% higher in obese participants than in non-obese participants.

The researchers suspected that this adaptation mechanism could have negative consequences in situations where the workload of the heart increases. To test this hypothesis, they induced an increase in cardiac output from the heart by administering dobutamine by infusion to the participants, while doing the imaging and NMR spectroscopy tests described above. In non-obese participants, both ATP delivery and k_f^CK  increased in response to dobutamine infusion, by 80% and 86%, respectively. In contrast, there was no significant increase in ATP delivery and k_f^CK in obese participants under the same stress conditions imposed on the heart. In addition, the systolic increase caused by the increased heart workload was lower in obese participants (+16%) than in non-obese participants (+21%).

Impacts of weight loss
Of the 45 obese participants, 36 agreed to participate in a 6-month weight loss nutritional intervention, and of these 27 successfully lost weight (-11% of body weight and -23% of body fat, on average). This weight loss was associated with an improvement in several parameters, including a 13% decrease in blood cholesterol, a 9% decrease in fasting glucose, and a 41% reduction in insulin resistance. Weight loss has also been associated with reduced left ventricular end diastolic mass and volume, improved diastolic function, and increased ability to exercise. Weight loss in obese participants was associated with increased phosphocreatine/ATP ratio and decreased k_f^Ckrest and ATP delivery. In fact, obese participants who were successful in losing weight saw their myocardial energy parameters return to values ​​similar to those measured in non-obese participants.

These findings shed light on the likely cause of the exhaustion symptoms after an effort that are present in the majority of obese people. Fortunately, the decrease in cardiac energy capacity induced by obesity is reversible by weight loss, which represents new avenues for the treatment of cardiomyopathies associated with obesity.