Posted on 12/05/2007 10:49:41 PM PST by neverdem
Researchers have managed to restore heart function by transplanting muscle stem cells into damaged mouse hearts. Their results suggest that the technique could one day be used to heal heart tissue in humans.
Similar transplants have been tried before in both mice and humans, but have met with little success. Although the grafts sometimes improved the function of the heart, they also raised the risk of abnormally fast heartbeats, in a disorder called ventricular tachycardia. Ventricular tachycardia is the main cause of sudden death in patients who have had a heart attack, killing about 15% of patients within three years of their attack.
“It’s an enormous clinical problem that is clearly unsatisfactorily treated by our available tools,” says Richard Lee, a researcher and cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. “A great number of things that we’ve tried to do to suppress arrhythmias in humans have instead caused them.”
Heart attacks in humans are typically caused by a gradual loss of blood flow that slowly starves cardiac cells of nutrients. As the cells die, heart function declines.
Researchers have long hunted for a way to either prevent or reverse the effects of heart failure by replacing the damaged heart cells. Early results showed that injecting injured regions of the heart with skeletal-muscle stem cells or even bone-marrow cells could restore some function.
Exactly how this works is unclear: some say that the muscle stem cells contract just like heart-muscle cells, helping the heart to beat. Others propose that the transplanted cells stiffen the cardiac wall, or perhaps secrete compounds that aid neighbouring, functional cardiac muscle cells. Whatever they do, one thing is clear: both cell types sometimes improve the heart’s ability to beat, but they also disrupt its beating rhythm.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
stem cell ping
as someone with an ejection fraction of 41% I wouldn’t mind some of that stuff
Here's the key paragraph:
To test whether connexin 43 was indeed the key factor, they team tried using adult muscle stem cells that had been forced to express the protein. This produced similarly good results. “If you make these cells express connexin 43, they correct or reverse the vulnerability to arrhythmia,” says Kotlikoff. This could liberate future researchers from relying on embryonic tissue, which can be more difficult to acquire.
A simpler recipe for human stem cells
Found 1632 studies with search of: stem cells
You might be interested in the third result on the second link, wardaddy. There could be more. I just gave it a quick glance.
Dr. Scarpetta, that second link could have something that you might consider. Use a diagnosis as specific as possible, e.g. osteoarthritis, degenerative joint disease, etc. Use the find option of the edit function in your toolbar to scan pages more quickly.
Embryonic Stem Cells cannot do this...
Now, let us stop spending billions and billions of dollars on embryonic stem cell research...
ping
It is getting to where one has to apply the (D)/(R) test to stem cell articles. If an article about the benefits of stem cells does not mention the source of the cells, they are adult. If an article about the failure of stem cells does not mention the sorce, they are embryonic.
Thank you
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