Therapeutic potential of potassium channel openers in peripheral vascular disease and asthma.

Potassium channel opener's (KCOs) were originally thought of as nonselective smooth muscle relaxants. However, recent investigations in animal models of both peripheral vascular disease (PVD) and asthma have revealed interesting effects of these drugs at unexpectedly low doses. Hemodynamically, KCOs are interesting in PVD since they have little effect on blood supply to normally perfused skeletal muscle, but enhance perfusion to chronically ligated ischemic tissue. In animal PVD models, SDZ PCO-400 and cromakalim have been shown to improve recovery of muscle energy stores from ischemia or to preserve performance under conditions of ischemic contracture. Beneficial effects in rat PVD models were manifest at doses below those affecting systemic blood pressure and may be attributable to a selective dilatation of collateral vessels. With regard to the airways, the apparent efficacy of KCOs as antiasthmatic drugs seems not to be attributable solely to their bronchodilator activity. Although KCOs elicit no antiinflammatory effect in animal models, studies with SDZ PCO-400 in guinea pigs sensitized to antigen or treated with immune complexes have revealed that expression of airway hyperreactivity is significantly inhibited at drug doses exhibiting only modest bronchodilator activity. At least part of this action can be attributed to inhibition at the level of neural innervation of the airways, possibly through attenuation of nonadrenergic noncholinergic (NANC) transmission. Thus, based on results generated in animal models of asthma and PVD, clinical evaluation of the KCOs in these indications would seem warranted, with the hope that (due to their “selective” actions) beneficial therapeutic effects can be achieved at doses devoid of unwanted systemic actions.