Patients
This was a prospective observational study conducted at a single center. Consecutive symptomatic HF patients with T2DM who were hospitalized in Fujieda Municipal General Hospital (Japan) and treated with administration of empagliflozin (at a dose of 10 mg daily) were screened for eligibility. The diagnosis of T2DM was based on the World Health Organization criteria [13]. After the cardiac assessment, patients diagnosed as DMCMP with LV ejection fraction (EF) greater than 40% were enrolled. Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) was performed in all participants, and their myocardial extracellular volume fraction (ECV), a reliable marker of cardiac fibrosis, was evaluated. According to previous reports [14, 15], global ECV > 30% was considered elevated with advanced replacement myocardial fibrosis. Therefore, the patients were divided into the early DMCMP group (global ECV ≤ 30%) and advanced DMCMP group (global ECV > 30%) and followed-up prospectively.
Exclusion criteria were as follows: (1) age less than 20 or greater than 80 years, (2) in-hospital death, (3) New York Heart Association (NYHA) class I or brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) < 100 pg/mL, (4) LVEF ≤ 40%, (5) other cardiomyopathies, (6) valvular or congenital heart disease, (7) normal LV systolic function: LVGLS (absolute value) ≥ 18% [3], (8) type 1 diabetes mellitus or insulin-dependent T2DM: C-peptide immunoreactivity index < 0.8 [16] or insulin user, (9) newly diagnosed T2DM (less than 1 year) or no antidiabetic medications before administration of empagliflozin, (10) current or previous use of SGLT2i, (11) persistent arrhythmia, (12) pacemaker implantation, (13) contraindication for CMR (implanted metallic objects, allergy to contrast media, and bronchial asthma), (14) estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) ≤ 30 mL/min/1.73 m2, (15) malignant tumor or inflammatory disease, (16) pregnancy, (17) refusal to informed consent, and (18) prior history of myocardial infarction, cerebral infarction, pancreatitis, and hospitalization for HF. For the exclusion of ischemic cardiomyopathy, coronary angiography was performed in all participants. Patients with ≥ 90% coronary artery stenosis were excluded. Patients with 75% stenosis were also excluded if functional ischemia was proven by over 10% ischemic area matched with angiography in myocardial perfusion scintigraphy. For the exclusion of hypertensive heart disease, patients with diastolic blood pressure ≥ 90 mmHg were excluded [2]. For the exclusion of other cardiomyopathies, patients with regional LV wall motion abnormalities, late gadolinium enhancement (LGE), excessive LV dilatation (LV end-diastolic volume index: > 97 mL/m2 [2]), and excessive LV hypertrophy (LV myocardial mass index: > 69 g/m2 for women or 91 g/m2 for men [17]) as evaluated by CMR were not included.
Outcomes
The primary outcome was the improvement in LV function, defined as changes in LV systolic function assessed as LVGLS, and diastolic function assessed as E/e’ between baseline and 12 months after the administration of empagliflozin.
The secondary outcomes were the NYHA class after 12 months and the changes in glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) and BNP levels between baseline and after 12 months.
Anthropometrics and blood examination
At the time of enrollment, age, gender, height, body weight, blood pressure, and heart rate of all participants were recorded. NYHA class and blood samples including hemoglobin, HbA1c, sodium, eGFR, and BNP at admission were used as baseline data. Fasting C-peptide and plasma glucose was checked with hematocrit at the time of CMR, and the C-peptide immunoreactivity index was calculated using the following formula: fasting C-peptide/fasting plasma glucose × 100. Serum HbA1c and BNP levels were measured routinely at baseline and at 12 months.
Ultrasonic echocardiography
Ultrasonic echocardiography was performed at baseline and after 12 months using an Aplio 400® (Canon Medical Systems Corporation, Tochigi, Japan) by two cardiac ultrasonographers who were blinded to the patients' backgrounds. Two-dimensional gray-scale cine loops from three consecutive heartbeats were obtained at end-expiratory apnea from standard parasternal and apical views. According to the guidelines of the American Society of Echocardiography/European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging [18], standard echocardiographic measurements were performed. LVEF was measured using the modified Simpson method. The E-wave velocity was measured using pulsed-wave Doppler recording from the apical four-chamber view. Spectral pulsed-wave Doppler-derived e’ was obtained by averaging the septal and lateral mitral annulus, and the E/e’ was calculated to obtain an estimate of LV filling pressure. LVGLS was measured using two-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiography. Speckle-tracking strain was analyzed with the 2D Wall Motion Tracking Application® software (Canon Medical Systems Corporation, Tochigi, Japan). While maximizing the frame rate, the LV endocardial border was traced manually at the end-diastolic frame. The software automatically tracked the myocardium throughout the cardiac cycle. The peak values of six segmental longitudinal strains were obtained from the apical four-, three-, and two-chamber views, and LVGLS was calculated by averaging the values (Fig. 1).
CMR scanning protocol
All CMR exams were performed using a 3.0-Tesla scanner (Ingenia®, Philips, Eindhoven, Netherlands) with a 32-element cardiac receiver coil. Vector-electrocardiogram-gated standard steady-state free precession cine sequences were acquired in short axes covering the whole LV and long-axis (four-, three-, two-chamber) views. LGE images were acquired 10 min post-contrast (Gadovist® 0.1 mmol/kg) injection. T1 maps were generated before and 15 min after gadolinium contrast injection using a modified Look-Locker inversion recovery sequence [19] during breath-holding in end-expiration to produce 11 raw images with increasing inversion times (TI, 100–5000 ms) in a LV short-axis view (TR/TE, 2.20/1.02 ms; flip angle, 20°). Blood samples were taken for hematocrit determination within 24 h before the scan. All maps were analyzed using Ziostation2® ver. 2.9 2–2 (Ziosoft, Tokyo, Japan). Myocardial T1 values and ECV were determined by drawing regions of interest in each segment of the LV slice according to the American Heart Association 16-segment model (Fig. 1). ECV values were calculated according to the following formula: ECV = (1 - HCT) × (1/T1 value myocardium post − 1/T1 value myocardium pre)/(1/T1 value blood post − 1/T1 value blood pre). The global ECV was calculated by averaging the values of the 16 segments.
Statistical analysis
We included data from all patients in the analysis of baseline characteristics and outcomes according to the intention-to-treat principle. Normally distributed continuous variables are expressed as the mean and standard deviation. Levene’s test showed that T2DM duration, eGFR, BNP, left atrial dimension, and LV end-diastolic dimension were not distributed normally. These variables are expressed as the median and interquartile range. Student’s t-test or Mann–Whitney U test was used to compare differences between the two groups, where appropriate. A simple linear regression analysis was performed to evaluate the correlations. All statistical tests were two-tailed, and values of p < 0.05 were considered to indicate statistical significance. IBM SPSS Statistics® version 19.0 (SPSS, Chicago, IL, USA) was used for statistical analyses.