Understanding Cardiac Stress
How Heart Failure Creates a Vicious Cycle
When the heart can't pump efficiently, your body faces a crisis: tissues aren't getting enough oxygen and nutrients. In response, your body releases massive amounts of neurohormones - chemical messengers like norepinephrine and angiotensin II - to try to compensate.
These stress signals temporarily help maintain blood pressure and blood flow. But over time, they become toxic to the heart itself. They cause the heart muscle to thicken abnormally, scar tissue builds up, the heart becomes stiff and doesn't relax properly, and the vicious cycle worsens. More stress signals, more damage, less function.
Meanwhile, the heart releases its own distress peptide called B-type Natriuretic Peptide (BNP) - essentially the heart's SOS call. BNP tells your kidneys to dump salt and water, trying to reduce the load on the struggling heart.
"The heart's survival response becomes the heart's worst enemy."
This is where peptide therapy intervenes. Some peptides mimic the heart's own beneficial signals, while others support the heart muscle directly, and emerging research shows some can even stimulate cardiac regeneration and repair.