Posted on 04/04/2009 9:14:42 AM PDT by Scanian
It's humbling to see medical dogma overturned, but that is exactly what happened when, contrary to deeply embedded thought, scientists led by Jonas Frisen from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm reported in Science today that the heart can grow new muscle cells, and does so regularly, albeit slowly, in the course of a lifetime.
To cardiologists, this is a blockbuster discovery, since the heart has been pegged as a disadvantaged organ in terms of injury, healing, and repair. Susceptible to coronary blockages that can cut off blood and destroy major hunks of heart muscle at one time in a heart attack, the heart can only heal itself slowly, often leaving behind thinned and baggy scar tissue devoid of healthy, beating muscle. And the distortion and remodeling of the heart that comes with this muscle loss sets the patient up for cardiac failure, blood clots, and nasty heart rhythms. It was always assumed the heart could do no better. But that does not seem to be so.
The clever piece of work from Sweden used carbon dating to figure out the age of human heart cells. The spike in concentration of atmospheric radioactive carbon-14 triggered by above-ground Cold War nuclear tests between 1955 and 1963 allowed the researchers (with the help of physicists and sophisticated mass spectrometry from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California) to discover that, lo and behold, the heart has slow and silent regenerative abilities. The evidence: the many heart cells whose nuclei—which last the life of the cell—had radioactive carbon levels that coincided with the atmospheric spikes, occurring many years after the person was born. The study found that younger adults renew about 1 percent of their heart cells per year. The growth falls off to roughly half of that in the elderly.
(Excerpt) Read more at health.usnews.com ...
The next question is, “How can we tweek the process to speed it up?”
I remember reading somwhere that they found they could speed up the heart’s rate of regeneration by drilling lots of tiny little holes into it.
Cardioacupuncture?
I am sure research with embryonic stem cells will be an experiment someone will perform.
I certainly do hope that the Framingham Heart Study is paying full attention to this.
I’d like to know how to mend a broken heart. Seriously. Time certainly has not healed mine.
How long before the media credits Obama’s overturning of embryonic stem cell research for this?????
My cardiologist is recommending drilling little holes in my upper heart valve, along with open heart surgery that begins with sawing open my sternum.
To which I said, “I’d like another opinion”.
Heck, why don’t they just sleeve tatoo my aorta?
Sounds like a rough recovery period to me.
I read somewhere, maybe here on FR...
People rarely die from a disease. They usually die from the cure.
Second, whether or not regeneration occurs in any organ or tissue in not determined only by the presence of cells that can replicate. It is also very much dependent upon the environment in which those cells are replicating. For example, you can lop off a big chunk of someone's liver and the remaining liver will regenerate what was lopped off, IF the liver architecture is intact and the conditions are right. On the other hand, if you destroy your liver with alcohol and wind up with fibrosis (cirrhosis) the liver can't regenerate efficiently. This is not because there are no more cells left to replicate. It is because they can't replicate into a normal liver architecture. This is probably also the case in patients with heart attacks. The infarction area heals by scar/fibrosis, and this may limit attempts at regeneration.
I'm not saying that we won't ever be able to induce organ regeneration. I'm actually very optimistic. Newts can regenerate tissues very well, and you can lop off part of the heart of a zebrafish and it will grow back. The problem is that we aren't built that way, and the biology to get beyond that is very complex. Thus, it will take time, and it is highly unlikely they we will have a big eureka moment in the next few years.
Science is generally slowly progressive, with knowledge and discovery building upon knowledge and discovery. I am just tired of the hype that has hit science. The results of all the major stem cell therapeutic trials for patients who have had heart attacks have been very, very underwhelming, and there has been no evidence in any of these trials that new heart muscle is being generated. Don't ever trust newspapers and news media when they report on science. Always dig deeper. Also, the higher profile journals, like Science, are always on the lookout for the ‘sensational’. It's a liability for those journals in part.
Good point!!
ping
You wouldn’t possibly be a doctor, would you? I ask because, as a lymphoma patient, I regularly read up on all the latest and greatest news/research and bug my doctors to death with annoying questions. I’ve often wondered just how put off the typical doctor is by patients like me. Some of us really have a need to know if there is anything that can be done better for us.
The classic American response!
The cardiologist told me,
“Oh, this is routine surgery if you go out of state to one of the major heart centers! You’ll be on your feet within 24 hours, be discharged in four days, and be driving again in three weeks!”
I replied, “It’s routine to those who aren’t going through it.”
Then I added, “Aren’t I supposed to be feeling bad before all this becomes necessary?”
I’ve seen some “cures”. They’re worse than the disorder, IMHO>
Wise words. Bear repeating. It is sad that Science, and Nature as well, have sold out to the market.
I don't know what type of lymphoma you have, but the prognosis can be very good for many of them.
My prayers and best wishes to you..
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