MedicalNewsToday
Improving outcomes for people with heart conditions was a recurring theme this week. We reported on how treatment with the “hunger hormone” ghrelin boosts pumping capacity after heart failure, and on the importance of more frequent follow-up phone calls after leaving hospital for people with heart failure. But perhaps most intriguing of all is a recent discovery that heart tissue can be made more resilient and better able to recover after heart attack.
Heart attacks can cause permanent damage to the heart tissue, but researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have discovered a new way to protect the heart before a heart attack happens. This is important because during a heart attack, the coronary arteries become blocked, parts of the heart muscle die as a result, and this damaged tissue cannot regenerate. This makes it difficult to reverse heart damage in adult humans. However, the researchers found that when a gene coding for the protein ERBB2 in mice was activated, their heart cells were “reset” and able to grow and heal again. Crucially, the researchers found that treated mice were able to recover from a heart attack months after their treatment with ERBB2. MNT spoke with Dr. Avraham Shakked, lead author of the study, who said, “perhaps most exciting is the cardioprotective effect that we weren’t really expecting to find or see at all that has the most potential impact at some point in the future.” Now the team hopes to better understand the mechanism behind this protective effect and test their findings in larger mammals before considering clinical applications in humans. This would include the development of new treatments to repair heart tissue and improve heart function, eventually reducing the number of deaths caused by heart attacks.
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