Congratulations to Jiandong Zhang, M.D., Interventional Cardiology Fellow, Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine; Pharmacology alumnus postdoctoral fellow, formerly in the Jensen Lab, in collaboration with Joseph S. Rossi, MD, MSCI, FACC, FSCAI, Professor of Medicine; Director, Cardiac Catheterization Lab; Program Director, Interventional Cardiology Fellowship; Co-Director of Cardiology Clinical Trials, and Chase Latour, Ph.D., a 5th-year doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology, UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, for publishing articles, titled “Cardiomyocyte Alpha-1A Adrenergic Receptors Mitigate Postinfarct Remodeling and Mortality by Constraining Necroptosis” and “Cardiovascular Outcomes of Alpha Blockers vs 5-alpha Reductase Inhibitors for Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia”, in the journals JACC: Basic to Translational Science and JAMA Open, respectively.
Dr. Zhang was a first author on both of these two recently published papers. The study that appears in JACC used cell culture and a mouse model of myocardial infarction (MI) to identify a novel mechanism of cardioprotection for alpha-1A adrenergic receptors. In collaboration with Dr. Rossi, they also found that patients taking medications that inhibit alpha-1 adrenergic receptors (“alpha blockers”) had an increased risk of death compared with patients not taking alpha-blockers after undergoing PCI for MI at UNC. The study that appears in JAMA Open was carried out in collaboration with trainees and faculty in the UNC School of Public Health and the UNC Department of Urology. Here Dr. Zhang and co-first author, Chase Latour, followed up on the UNC single center data indicating cardiovascular risk associated with alpha blockers (as above) in a 20% random sample of Medicare beneficiaries. They found that men taking alpha blockers (n=163,829) had a modest but statistically significant increased risk of death and Major Adverse Cardiac Events within one year of starting treatment when compared with men who were prescribed 5-alpha reductase inhibitors (n=26,039), the second-most commonly used medication to treat BPH. Both of these papers can can be read online now.
