The study run by the National Institutes of Health, dubbed Accord, aimed to see if the dual-drug therapy could reduce heart disease and stroke-related events in diabetes patients at particularly high risk of serious heart problems due to additional risk factors, such as obesity and high blood pressure.

All subjects in the 5,518-patient trial took Zocor, which is available generically as simvastatin.

One group also received TriCor, which is designed to lower the blood fats known as triglycerides and raise “good” HDL cholesterol. TriCor belongs to a class of drugs called fibrates.

There was an 8 percent risk reduction from the combination therapy compared with the statin plus dummy pill, but researchers said the result could have been a statistical fluke.

“Although our analysis suggests that certain patients may benefit from combination therapy, this study provides important information that should spare many people with diabetes unneeded therapy with fibrates,” said Dr. Henry Ginsberg, the study’s lead investigator, who presented the data at the American College of Cardiology scientific meeting in Atlanta.

Based on the results, Dr. Steven Nissen, a prominent cardiologist with the Cleveland Clinic, predicted that “the use of fenofibrates will decline precipitously. It’s another troubling example of a drug that was approved that didn’t work.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Sunday said the data will undergo close scrutiny.

“The FDA will conduct a thorough review of the primary Accord data as soon as they become available,” said agency spokeswoman Karen Riley.

“The results of Accord were widely expected and not surprising given that two-thirds of patients in the trial would not be treated with fibrates under current guidelines,” Eugene Sun, Abbott’s vice president for global pharmaceutical development, said in a statement.

“The results support how fibrates are used in treatment today.”

LOWERING BLOOD PRESSURE NO HELP, EITHER

A second prong of the NIH Accord program tested 4,733 patients with Type 2 diabetes and elevated blood pressure.

It found that more intensive blood pressure lowering failed to cut the risk of heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular death significantly more than the current standard of care.

There were 208 heart disease or stroke-related events in patients whose systolic blood pressure was reduced to below 120, compared with 237 among patients whose target goal was less than 140 – results researchers deemed a potential statistical fluke.

Current guidelines recommend that adults with Type 2 diabetes maintain systolic blood pressure – the top number of a blood pressure reading – at less than 130.

The risk of stroke alone was significantly cut by about 40 percent in the intensive treatment group, although the total numbers were low – 36 versus 62 in the standard care group.

Researchers also noted higher incidence of complications in the intensive group, including abnormally high levels of blood potassium, and some measures of kidney function were worse.

“Both of these studies provide evidence that going beyond the standard of care provides no substantive additional benefit in this population of adults with diabetes at especially high risk of cardiovascular events,” said Denise Simons-Morton, the NIH’s Accord project officer.

Researchers followed 12,152 American and European male and female smokers, formers smokers and nonsmokers for three years. During that time, current smokers were 4.16 times more likely to die of cancer, 2.26 times more likely to die of heart disease and 2.58 times more likely to die from any cause than were former or nonsmokers. Current smokers were also more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke.

There were no significant differences between former smokers and nonsmokers in the risk for dying from heart disease or any cause, but former smokers were more likely to die of cancer than those who’d never smoked.

“The analysis provides further strong evidence that people with heart disease who continue to smoke take a very high risk of increasing their chances of death in the short term,” principal investigator Dr. Deepak L. Bhatt, chief of cardiology at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, said in a news release from the American Heart Association.

“This study provides impetus for a smoker to stop,” he said. “The benefits of risk reduction accrue relatively quickly when someone stops smoking, although the lingering cancer risk is still there.”

During a heart attack, vessels that supply blood to the heart become blocked, preventing enough oxygen from getting through. The heart muscle dies or is permanently damaged.

But researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston report progress toward someday being ale to regenerate heart tissue after a heart attack or heart failure and even in children who are born with congenital heart defects.

In a study on mice, they showed that neuregulin 1 (NRG1), a growth factor involved in the development of the heart and nervous system, can fuel heart-muscle growth and recovery of cardiac function when injected after a heart attack.

This is a significant development because coronary heart disease, which causes heart attack and angina, is the leading cause of death in America.

After birth, heart-muscle cells stop dividing and proliferating. But experts, led by Dr. Bernhard Kuhn and Kevin Bersell of the cardiology department at Children’s, restarted the cell cycle with NRG1, spurring the heart-muscle cells to divide and make copies of themselves.

When the team injected NRG1 into live mice once a day for three months after the animals had heart attacks, heart regeneration increased and the pumping function improved, compared with untreated mice.

In addition, the NRG1-injected mice did not show some common aftereffects of heart failure.

The study, funded by the cardiology department at Children’s Hospital Boston, the Charles Hood Foundation and the American Heart Association, found that cell growth does not have to come from stem cells. A report on the research appears in the July 24 issue of Cell.

“Although many efforts have focused on stem cell-based strategies, our work suggests that stem cells aren’t required and that stimulating differentiated cardiomyocytes [heart-muscle cells] to proliferate may be a viable alternative,” Kuhn, the study’s senior investigator, said in a news release from the hospital.