When the heart begins to fail, the body does everything in its power to fix the situation. But sometimes, those compensatory mechanisms ultimately do more harm than good. Such is the case with the adrenal hormone aldosterone, which stimulates the heart to pump harder, causing greater damage to the heart muscle. But now, researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM) are closer than ever to putting the brakes on that process. With their recent discovery of an unexpected mechanism by which signaling molecules known as G protein-coupled receptor kinases (GRKs) mediate aldosterone-induced heart damage, they have opened the path to an important therapeutic advance.