By Emily GlazerThe Daily Northwestern

Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine has received a $15 million federal grant to study how best to treat heart attack patients with unusually low heart rates.

Researchers will use the money from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to investigate whether patients with bradycardia – those whose hearts beat fewer than 60 times per minute – can safely be treated with beta-blockers, a type of medication that improves long-term survival rates for heart-attack patients.

Patients with very low heart rates are usually unable to take these beta-blockers.

Participants in the five-year study first will receive pacemakers to regulate their heart rates and later will receive beta-blocker therapy.

“(We’re looking) at patients who are at the far end of the spectrum – some of the sickest after a heart attack – and (trying) to find ways to give them medication that they wouldn’t normally be able to take,” said Feinberg Prof. Dan Fintel, the study’s local principal investigator and director of the Coronary Care Unit at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Feinberg Prof. Jeffrey Goldberger, director of cardiac electrophysiology at Northwestern Memorial and the national principal investigator of the study, said he hopes to start enrollment no later than June.

The study plans to enroll 1,124 patients from 27 states, as well as sites in Canada and Israel, said project manager Janet Cahill.

Northwestern Memorial plans to enroll between 20 and 30 subjects locally, she said.

The study has been in the works since 1998, said Goldberger, also the study’s designer.

“It went through a whole series of events, roadblocks and obstacles” before finally getting approval, Goldberger said.

Yves Rosenberg, a program director with the federal institute, will be the project scientist and help oversee the study.

Rosenberg said he is eager to find out if the study can expand patients’ options.

“I’m looking forward to seeing if the patients that are not currently benefiting from beta-blockers can benefit … it’s a small but significant number of patients,” he said.

Reach Emily Glazer at [email protected].