Heart muscle can regenerate after failure in some people with artificial hearts, an international research team has found.
The team
co-led by a physician-scientist at the University of Arizona College of
Medicine – Tucson’s Sarver Heart Center in the US found that a subset of
artificial heart patients can regenerate heart muscle, which may open the door
to new ways to treat and perhaps someday cure heart failure.
There is no
cure for heart failure, though medications can slow its progression. The only
treatment for advanced heart failure, other than a transplant, 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. If you’re playing
soccer and you tear a muscle, you need to rest it, and it heals,” said Hesham
Sadek, chief of the Division of Cardiology at the University of Arizona College
of Medicine – Tucson’s Department of Medicine.
“When a
heart muscle is injured, it doesn’t grow back. We have nothing to reverse heart
muscle loss,” Sadek said in a paper published in the journal Circulation.
Sadek led a
collaboration between international experts to investigate whether heart
muscles can regenerate.
The project
began with tissue 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 more than six times the rate of healthy hearts.
“This is the
strongest evidence we have, so far, that human heart muscle cells can actually
regenerate, which really is exciting, because it solidifies the notion that
there is an intrinsic capacity of the human heart to regenerate,” Sadek said.
It also strongly supports the hypothesis that the inability of the heart muscle to ‘rest’ is a major driver of the heart’s lost ability to regenerate shortly after birth. It may be possible to target the molecular pathways involved in cell division to enhance the heart’s ability to regenerate, said the study authors.
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