NEW YORK New York: An international research team has found that heart muscle in some people with artificial hearts can regenerate after failure. Led by a physician-scientist from the Sarwar Heart Center at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson in the US, The team found that a subgroup of patients with an artificial heart could regenerate heart muscle, which could open the door to new ways to treat heart failure and perhaps someday cure it.
There is no cure for heart failure, although medications can slow its progression. The only treatment for advanced heart failure other than transplantation is pump replacement through an artificial heart, called a left ventricular assist device, which can help the heart pump blood.
“Skeletal muscle has a significant ability to regenerate after injury,” said Hesham Sadek, MD, chief of the division of cardiology in the department of medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson. “If you're playing football and you tear a muscle, So you need to give her rest, and she'll be fine.” “When heart muscle is injured, it doesn't grow back. We don't have anything to reverse the loss of heart muscle,” Sadek said in a paper published in the journal Circulation. Sadek led a collaboration between international experts to investigate whether heart muscle could be regenerated.
The project began with tissues from artificial heart patients provided by colleagues at the University of Utah Health and School of Medicine, led by Stavros Drakos, a pioneer in left ventricular assist device-mediated recovery. The investigators found that patients with artificial hearts regenerated muscle cells at a rate six times higher than those with healthy hearts. Sadek said, “This is the strongest evidence yet that human heart muscle cells can actually regenerate, which is really exciting, because it reinforces the notion that the human heart has an inherent ability to regenerate. Is.” It also strongly supports the hypothesis that the inability of the heart muscle to 'relax' is a major reason for the heart losing its ability to regenerate soon after birth. The study authors said it may be possible to target molecular pathways involved in cell division to enhance the heart's regenerative capacity.
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