Surviving a heart attack is only half of the battle since 20% of patients will experience another cardiac arrest within 12 months of the first, partly because the organ has weakened and developed scar tissue.
Image source pixabay
As a result, scientists have been trying to discover how they can save hearts and restore muscles, instead of just allowing dead tissue to make people susceptible to future problems and ultimately more likely to die.
Now, a new study has shown how this can be done, using a single gene.
A team at the University of Alabama has analyzed how cardiac stem cells (called cardiomyocytes) grafted onto damaged areas, as a repair patch, could better overexpress a gene at home.
Experience has shown that overexpression of a gene, the CCND2 cell cycle activator gene, "significantly" improves the repair of dead muscle.
This is because cells grow and divide more than grafted cells in a control.
This increase in growth and division resulted in increased heart muscle at the site of the dead tissue of the attack, better heart function, and decreased the size of the dead tissue.
And not only did they regenerate the muscles, but they also increased the formation of new blood vessels in the infarcted edge area (where the obstruction was).
Using stem cells derived from human-induced pluripotent stem cells, this time they were injected into a mouse model, but the team hopes that this treatment will be used clinically for heart attack patients in the future.
In the United Kingdom, one in seven men and one in eleven women die each year from coronary heart disease, most of which is a heart attack, according to the British Heart Foundation.
It's amazing how heart disease kills more people around the world than any of the things that scare us more, such as hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, cancer and Ebola. It's like we've come to accept it as just something that happens and largely ignore it. It would be interesting to see how many news reports covered the plague of heart disease as opposed to shark attacks, for example, to see what the media is telling us to be concerned about. If we don't hear about heart disease, then it's not an issue, unfortunately. I think, simply, it's a boring topic that is not newsworthy and sensational for mainstream media, so we're not conditioned to worry about it. The result is we are less scared to eat a burger than we are to swim in the ocean, yet the first one is more likely to shorten our life.
@cthulhuzappa you are right man... Thanks a lot for stopping by to drop your take concerning my post.. I have no option but to follow you and go through your blog.
Expect more posts from me...
Followed you right back !
WOW, i like the photograph, its emotional,thanks for the message
Oh you are welcome @nicholasmwanje I hope this post is educative and informative to you.. The photo used really passed a strong message.
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