This confirmation of the early
heart’s capacity to regenerate is welcome and strongly indicates that a
protocol exists to selectively replace damage.
It may turn out to be a combination of surgical removal of damage
followed by scaffolds and some form of bio stimulator. These are all been successfully worked on
today and the big problems are slowly yielding to research.
Much sooner than much later organ
regeneration and damage repair is going to become a routine part of
medicine. This will have the enormous
benefit of restoring primary health for most and returning them to productive
living. On top of that the procedures
will be swift to implement and the patient recovery complete.
The investment by society will be
a fraction of the benefit.
Even without repairing cellular
aging, a human being is able to be economically active into his nineties if his
body is stable. That it is presently a rarity
is only an artifact of our lack of knowledge.
Damaged hearts could one day repair themselves, mouse study suggests
Newborn mice can regenerate 15% of their heart tissue, raising the
prospect of treatments to regenerate human hearts
Ian Sample,
science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24
February 2011
Even if a patient survives a heart attack, scar tissue impairs the
organ's ability to pump blood leading to severe disability. Photograph: Scott
Goldsmith/Getty
The hearts of newborn mice can repair themselves after an injury, a
discovery that raises fresh hopes for healing damaged hearts in people.
Scientists knew that some fish and amphibians could regrow parts of their
hearts after major injuries, but there was no good evidence for this in
mammals.
In the latest study, US researchers showed that one-day-old mice could
regenerate 15% of their heart tissue within three weeks, an ability they lost a
week or so after being born. Heart scans showed that parts of the organ that
had been surgically removed had not only grown back but were functioning
normally.
The finding has raised hopes that the human heart may also have a
natural ability to heal itself. If this could be switched on in adults, it
could potentially help 750,000 people in Britain
"When a person has a heart attack and
heart muscle cells are lost, the heart loses pump function, causing heart
failure and eventual death," said Eric Olson, a molecular biologist at
Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas, Texas.
"Now that we know that the mammalian heart indeed possesses the
potential to regenerate, at least early in life, we can begin to search for
drugs or genes or other things that might reawaken this potential in the adult
heart of mice and eventually of humans."
Writing
in the journal, Science, the researchers explain how surgery to remove the
bottom tip of the heart from newborn mice caused healthy heart muscle cells to
multiply and repair the injury.
Advances in medicine mean that more people survive heart attacks than
ever before, but patients are usually left with scar tissue that impairs the
heart's ability to pump blood around the body. Such debilitating heart failure
is one of Britain
Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British
Heart Foundation, said the discovery was exciting and "strengthens the
view that understanding how this happens could provide the key to healing adult
human hearts".
"If you get somebody to hospital immediately after a heart attack,
you might well start thinking of a treatment that starts this repair process
very quickly," he said. "But for a lot of other people, the main
trouble is heart failure when they have had some mild damage for years and
years and it slowly gets worse. At that point, you might think of more
complicated interventions, to reduce the amount of scarring before inducing the
heart to repair itself. It's a long way off, but these are probably the world
leaders in the field."
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