A new study by a team of researchers from Otago and Japan suggests the appetite-regulating hormone ghrelin could eventually be used clinically for the early treatment of critical limb ischemia (CLI).
This is an advanced form of peripheral artery disease, and involves the severe obstruction of blood flow to the extremities.
Major amputations are often required, and in half of the cases, death results within five years.
The leading risk factors are diabetes, obesity and age.
The condition means pain at rest, non-healing ulcers and gangrene.
Otago physiology department researchers Dr Rajesh Katare, Dr Daryl Schwenke and colleagues have showed administering ghrelin daily over two weeks markedly improved blood flow in affected limbs.
Dr Katare said the findings were exciting and involved ‘‘really dramatic data''.
They found ghrelin, also known as the ‘‘hunger hormone'', promoted growth of new structurally and functionally normal blood vessels, improved cell survival, and decreased tissue fibrosis.
‘‘It's quite ground-breaking. We're very optimistic.''
At present, there was no drug treatment for CLI and other techniques were effective in only half the cases.
Further animal-related research would be conducted over the next six to eight months and, if all went well, a new form of therapy could potentially be trialled in humans in about five years.
If the animal research remained promising, the eventual novel drug treatment was likely to ‘‘improve people's quality of life''.
Their research has just been published in the international journal Endocrinology.
Because ghrelin was already naturally occurring in the human body, and was already subject to clinical trials for other purposes, the potential new treatment could avoid some of the delays often experienced in drug development, he said.
About 30,000 to 40,000 New Zealanders have peripheral artery disease, in which the blood supply within limbs is restricted.
About 10,000 to 12,000 of those people have the advanced condition, CLI, and of these about 6000 required corrective surgery to their arteries at some stage.
About half of those undergoing corrective surgery eventually underwent limb amputations, affecting about 2000 to 3000 of the patients, he said.
