4 kidney Yang is the internal causes of heart failure and plays the pivotal role in the pathogenesis and prognosis of the disease. Previous studies have shown that the TCM syndrome- type of rats with heart failure following myocardial infarction in the current study may belong to the syndrome of deﬁ- ciency of Qi and blood stasis [11]. The pathogenesis mech- anisms could be that coronary artery ligation caused blood stasis in the heart, which leads to Qi damage and produces symptoms of Qi deﬁciency in the organ and the whole body. Treatment that promotes blood circulation and replenishes Qi could improve cardiac function. Considering that Qi def- iciency could develop into Yang deﬁciency and that kidney Yang is the origin of heart Yang, it is hypothesized that toni- fying kidney Yang would strengthen heart Yang, which fur- ther supplements heart Qi and makes the heart beat stronger. These eﬀects could be beneﬁcial for the treatment of heart failure. Based on the heart-kidney-related theory of TCM, in this study we investigated the therapeutic eﬀects of VAD, a precious kidney Yang supplementing medicine, on cardiac structure and function as measured in echocardiography and serum BNP levels in rats with HF induced by myocardial infarction. BNP is a 32-amino-acid polypeptide secreted by the ventricles of the heart in response to excessive stretching of heart muscle cells and therefore has been used as an objective index reﬂecting the immediate condition of cardiac function and clinical severity of HF [8]. The ﬁnding that VAD treatment elevated LVFS/LVEF and decreased BNP levels provides evidence for the protective eﬀects of VAD for the damaged heart. Recent studies have implicated multiple mechanisms of VAD in improving cardiac function. For instance, VAD could reduce the release of endothelin, prevent vascular contraction in the ischemic regions and enhance local coronary circulation [3]. VAD has also been reported to play a protective role on secondary injury of ischemic myo- cardium by promoting superoxide dismutase activities and decreasing serum malondialdehyde levels [4]. Lastly, VAD could elevate the levels of nitric oxide and calcitonin-gene- related peptide so as to modulate cardiomyocyte apoptosis [5]. We did not observe the therapeutic eﬀects of VAD in ca- rdiac structural parameters, a ﬁnding in contrast to a study showing that chronic treatment with VAD could signiﬁcantly reverse the enlargement of left ventricle caused by myocardial infarction [12]. The inconsistency may be due to that our study used VAD powder whereas the latter study used the extracts of VAD, which contains a higher proportion of active components. Our ﬁnding that four-week treatment of VAD showed diﬀerential therapeutic eﬀects on cardiac structure and function suggests that the treatment period of four weeks may be not long enough to induce structural changes of the heart as measured by echocardiography. According to our observation, VAD treatment can also reverse myocardial ﬁbrosis of HF (unpublished data), which may serve as the structural basis of functional changes induced by VAD. In the current study, we used captopril as a positive con- trol and found that VAD and captopril showed comparable eﬀects in reversing changes in functional parameters and Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine BNP levels in rats with heart failure. Although VAD is more expensive than captopril, it has edges over captopril for pa- tients with heart failure accompanied with lower blood pres- sure given the hypotensive side eﬀect of captopril. In conclusion, the kidney Yang supplementing drug, VAD, shows comparable therapeutic eﬀects with captopril for heart failure induced by myocardial infarction as revealed by functional parameter changes in echocardiography and ser- um BNP levels. These results provide evidence for the heart- kidney-related theory of TCM and demonstrate that heart failure due to heart Yang deﬁciency can be treated by strengthening kidney Yang. Therefore, VAD might be a po- tentially alternative and complementary medicine used in the treatment of heart failure. References [1] J. X. Ji, J. Qian, F. J. Huang, W. T. Wu et al., “Study on the active principles and pharmacological actions of hairy antler,” Chinese Journal of Biochemical Pharmaceutics, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 141–143, 2009 (Chinese). [2] D. Gu, G. Huang, X. Wu et al., “Investigation of prevalence and distributing feature of chronic heart failure in Chinese adult population,” Chinese Journal of Cardiology, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 3–6, 2003 (Chinese). 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