Breakthrough Study Reveals Potential for Heart Muscle Regeneration with Artificial Hearts

Heart Muscle Regeneration impossible right? Well a groundbreaking study conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona has unveiled an extraordinary discovery: in some of these patients with artificial hearts, there is considerable replacement of heart muscle. This research which has been reported in the Circulation research journal, provide new light of hope in the discovery of new treatment for heart failure and possibility the achievement of this heart disease.

Heart failure affects over 6.5 million adults today and is involved in 14% of fatalities according to the CDC. The only known treatment that can alleviate the symptoms of the disease is therefore to donate a heart, transplantation, utilization of LVADs and medications which slow down the advancement of the disease. These mechanical aids help pump blood but were never weaved in any form of assisting the heart muscle to repair its self after an attack. However, this study goes against this logic and posits that artificial hearts might give the cardiac muscles the opportunity to ‘rest,’ the way that other tissues with muscles – skeletal muscles, that is – get the opportunity to regenerate.

Dr. Hesham Sadek of the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson’s Sarver Heart Center spearheaded the study with other scholars. It was supported by the Leducq Foundation’s Transatlantic Networks of Excellence Programme through which scientists from the US and Europe are sponsored to work together on major medical issues.

The heart tissue samples used in the study were collected from recipients of an artificial heart who were patients of the University of Utah Health and School of Medicine. Carbon dating technology recently discovered by scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and Germany helped the team to determine that heart muscle cells of those patients were actively reproducing and the rates were 6,2 times higher than in healthy patients. This discovery offered an actual footage of the human cardiac muscle regeneration for the first time and something that was not yet established clinically in any way.

“This is the strongest evidence we have so far that human heart muscle cells can regenerate,” said Dr. Sadek. “It consolidates the idea that the human heart has a natural ability to remodel or partly regenerate a damaged zone which is impaired in early developmental stages. The fact that artificial hearts can rest the cardiac muscle may be partly behind it, as rest is how such cells are able to divide further.

The general principle of using resting heart muscles as an essential component of the therapy has been developed on the basis of Dr. Sadek’s previous studies. In 2011, his research showed that cardiac myocytes, for instance, were found to be actively cycling during fetal stages but soon stop just after birth to act as pumps that circulate blood constantly. In a later year in 2014 he suggested signs of mitosis in patients with artificial hearts meaning observations of reversal of symptoms in a few cases.

READ ALSO: 5 Creative Ways to Enjoy Olive Oil

This is where the current study builds on the previous by tracing the performance of artificial hearts back to conditions under which heart muscle regeneration is possible. Circulation inherent in artificial hearts pumps blood into the aorta and completely avoids the heart, providing a kind of rest for cardiac muscles while regeneration is under way.

Nonetheless, there are still questions to answer According to the research, some of the challenges include: Approximately 25% of artificial heart patients, described by researchers as ‘‘responders,’’ have considerable amounts of muscle regrowth. A subsequent question on the part of the researchers is to understand why this specific group of patients finds improvement while others remain unaffected.

“It remains unknown why certain patients respond to treatment while others do not,” Dr. Sadek also said. ‘Although potential therapies may not encourage many people to change their lifestyles, patients who do respond can benefit from stem cell therapy that allows for healthy heart muscle to be grown and limit the occurrence of heart failure .’ The interesting thing now is how to help all patients become responders. If successful, we could revolutionalise the management of heart failure.”

According to Dr. Sadek, artificial hearts technology is not in any way experimental; many technologies used in practice today have been around for years. They are familiar and reliable treatments, and therefore artificial hearts provide aince for enhancing heart regeneration therapies.

The conclusion from this research means that there is hope for millions of heart failure patients across the globe. If more could be learned about these processes of regeneration there could be targeted applications which would increase the heart’s attempt at healing itself. The developments of such as system could revolutionalize the administration of heart failure while recasting the potential of regenerative medicine for the control for other chronic illnesses.