Stop For A Heart Attack-Before it Gets Started

7/26/2009

Sunday, July 26 (Benjamin Rose Institute ) -- Cleveland, OH

Your heart is an amazing organ. It’s about the size of your fist and sits in the middle of your chest. Three times every minute the hard working heart pumps 6 quarts of blood throughout your body. Over a lifetime that’s about 1 million barrels of blood.

Most people don’t pay much attention to their heart until something goes wrong with it -- like a heart attack.

HEART DISEASE FACTS

Heart disease is a major cause of death in the United States. More than 80 percent of people who die of a heart attack are 65 or older. Older men are more likely to suffer a heart attack than older women although older women are more likely to die from it sooner than men. If you have a parent with heart disease you are at greater risk of developing heart-related illnesses yourself.

WARNING SIGNS OF A HEART ATTACK

• Common signs of heart attacks in men and women include:
• Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
• Pressure, fullness, discomfort in the center of the chest
• Pain radiating to the shoulders, back, neck, arms or jaw
• Pounding heartbeats or extra heartbeats
• Sweating, nausea, vomiting, indigestion
• Dizziness, weakness, lightheadedness
• Sudden extreme fatigue or panic
• Abdominal pain.

However women may have only a few of these symptoms and may not experience chest pain at all.

WHAT CAUSES HEART ATTACKS?

Heart attacks happen when the arteries that supply the heart with blood become blocked with fatty deposits called plaque. Over time these plaques rupture and cause blood clots to form. The clots block the artery and prevent it from supplying the heart muscle with oxygen. Without prompt treatment to remove or dissolve the clots, parts of the heart muscle begin die and are replaced by scar tissue. When a damaged heart can no longer pump blood effectively, irregular heartbeats develop that can lead to heart failure and death.

HEART DISEASE RISK FACTORS

Some heart attack risks can’t be changed although they can be reduced. At greater risk are people with a family history of heart disease, African Americans, Mexican Americans, American Indians, native Hawaiians, and some Asian Americans.

STOP A HEART ATTACK IN ITS TRACKS!

The good news is that the risk of having a heart attack can be reduced. If you older parent has a family history of heart disease both of you should have regular medical checkups to detect and treat the disease in its early stages.

Changing lifestyles and habits can significantly reduce the chances of having a heart attack for your family member – and for you. Join your older parent to:

• Stop smoking. Smokers’ risk of heart disease is 2 to 4 times greater than nonsmokers. Exposure to “second hand smoke” also increases heart attack risk.
• Lower blood cholesterol and blood pressure.
• Control diabetes by keeping blood sugar levels as normal as possible
• Get some exercise – every day. Even moderate walking can help control blood sugar and cholesterol levels, blood pressure and weight.
• Manage stress
• Reduce alcohol drinking
• Lose weight if your relative is overweight

Schedule regular appointments with your parent’s doctor to monitor your parent’s heart health, check weight and blood pressure and determine if any additional medical or lifestyle changes should be made. A variety of medications are available to reduce the risk of future heart attacks.

HEART ATTACK – IT’S A FAMILY AFFAIR

Caregivers are important helping an older relative prevent heart attack and recognizing heart attack signs and symptoms so he or she receives prompt medical attention. Families can also encourage him or her make important lifestyle changes to help prevent future heart attacks. You’ll also find that many of these prevention strategies can also benefit your own health!

What to do when out-of-line legs worsen achy knees

Associated Press

8/17/2009

WASHINGTON - Exercise your hips to help achy knees? If you've got knee arthritis, your whole leg starts subtly shifting out of alignment as you favor the sore spot.

Now scientists are testing ways to strengthen the entire leg so it stays straighter, in hopes of slowing the knee's deterioration.

"People with knee arthritis have kind of a bow-legged appearance," notes Laura Thorp of Rush University Medical Center.

An assistant anatomy professor, Thorp thinks that misalignment is a big key to the painful condition. She's not alone. Specialists now agree the more out of alignment a leg is, the faster arthritis in the knee worsens.

"You start with a little pain, then everything north and south of it has to compensate," explains Dr. John J. Callaghan of the University of Iowa, a knee and hip specialist with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. "It's not enough to concentrate on the knee."

The question is what to do about it. At issue is how your knee handles its load. Being even a little bow-legged puts extra pressure on the knee, especially the inner side. It has to carry a higher-than-normal load each time your foot strikes the ground.

Weight adds to the knee's load, too. Being 15 pounds or more overweight is a key risk factor for developing knee arthritis. So is having had a knee injury earlier in life, and the one unavoidable risk factor - getting older. About 27 million Americans have osteoarthritis, the wear-and-tear that breaks down the cartilage that cushions joints, causing pain and stiffness as the ends of bones rub on each other. Hundreds of thousands eventually turn to knee replacement for relief.

Even when researchers account for weight, Thorp says a misaligned leg compounds the extra load.

Exercise has long been prescribed for knee arthritis, mostly exercises that strengthen the hamstring and quadriceps - muscles that support the knee. Stronger muscles do in fact alleviate some knee pain, but they don't slow the inevitable worsening of arthritis. An Australian study last year showed quad strengthening had no effect on knee load. Interestingly, people with more misaligned legs also got less pain benefit from those exercises.

Rush's Thorp is trying a different, top-down approach - exercising not muscles that support the knee but those that support the hip.

Knee arthritis sufferers tend to have weak muscles on the outside of the hip, muscles that are key for gait, she found. Every time you take a step, the hip muscle on the standing side has to keep your pelvis level. If it's weak, it changes your pelvis alignment in a way that magnifies the already misaligned leg and adds even more twisting pressure to the knee.

The exercises themselves are similar to what patients are prescribed after a hip replacement. In a handful of knee patients who underwent a month of physical therapy to learn those exercises, Thorp measured a drop in knee load. Now she's enrolling 30 people with mild to moderate arthritis in a more formal study. They get not only the physical therapy, but are told to do the exercises at home six days a week for a second month, too.

If the exercises do reduce knee load, it would take far larger - and years longer - studies to see if that in turn slowed the arthritis, both Thorp and Callaghan caution.

Thorp's is among a handful of studies getting under way to look at hip exercises. Swedish researchers saw some drops in knee pressure when people who did exercises affecting both the knee and hip climbed stairs.

Other doctors are focusing on the south end, the foot and ankle. Repositioning the leg's alignment with custom-measured shoe inserts, called orthotics, sometimes helps.

The challenge: Finding people who agree to stick with exercise. People with painful joints tend to become sedentary if they weren't already.

Iowa's Callaghan already prescribes whole-leg exercises, including the hip, for knee patients - but he praises the Rush study for hunting proof of which specific activities truly help, information long missing when doctors give the exercise pep talk. He advises the newly diagnosed to try to keep in shape and suggests consulting a good physical therapist about how to work the whole leg, saying it can't hurt.

"It's hard for people to buy off on that, especially people who are out of shape," Callaghan says. "There's just not that much data out there."

---

EDITOR's NOTE - Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.

Study Finds Weight-Loss Surgery Safer Than Thought

SOURCES: Bruce Wolfe, M.D., professor, surgery, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, Ore.; Malcolm K. Robinson, M.D., assistant professor, surgery, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston; July 30, 2009, New England Journal of Medicine

7/29/2009

WEDNESDAY, July 29 (HealthDay News) -- For those considering bariatric surgery to combat significant obesity, a new study suggests the risk of complications may be much lower than what has previously been reported.

The study, which looked at both gastric bypass surgery and laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding (lap-band surgery), found that the risk of death for these surgeries was 0.3 percent and the risk of a major adverse outcome was 4.3 percent.

"Bariatric surgery is safe," said study co-author Dr. Bruce Wolfe, a professor of surgery at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. "Certain factors [such as a history of blood clots, obstructive sleep apnea or impaired functional status] increase the risk of complications, but you can discuss these risks as well as the potential benefits with your surgeon."

Results of the study appear in the July 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

As obesity rates have risen, so, too, has the popularity of bariatric surgery. Although it is a major surgical procedure, the benefits to the severely obese generally far outweigh the risks. In fact, the risk of death over time is about 35 percent lower for someone who's had the surgery compared to someone who remains extremely obese, according to background information in the study.

However, the surgery isn't for everyone. "If you're five or 10 pounds overweight, bariatric surgery isn't for you," said Dr. Malcolm K. Robinson, an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, and the author of an accompanying editorial in the same issue of the journal.

"Basically, when I or my colleagues advise surgery, it's because the benefits of surgery outweigh the risks. In general, that's the case for someone with a BMI [body-mass index] of 35 and weight-related health problems like diabetes or high blood pressure, or someone with a BMI of 40 or more," said Robinson, who added that as the risks of the surgery keep dropping, those BMI numbers may get even lower in the future.

The current study included 4,776 people who underwent one of the following types of bariatric surgery: lap-band surgery (1,198 patients), laparoscopic gastric bypass (2,975 patients), open gastric bypass (437 patients) or another procedure (166 patients). All of the surgeries were done by surgeons specifically qualified for this study. All of the surgeries took place between March 2005 and December 2007.

The average age of the study participant was 44.5 years old, 22 percent of the study volunteers were male and 11 percent were nonwhite. The average BMI in the study was 46.5. More than half of the study group had at least two coexisting medical conditions, the study authors noted.

In his editorial, Robinson points out that these procedures may represent "best-case scenarios" because they were done by experienced surgeons in high-volume bariatric centers. However, he said that because the field of bariatric surgery has advanced so much in the past few years, he believes these results are a "generally achievable phenomenon."

Both Robinson and Wolfe recommend that any person considering bariatric surgery should choose a facility that's been designated as a "Center of Excellence" because that means that the surgeon and the whole health-care team are qualified and experienced.

More information

Learn more about bariatric surgery from the U.S. government's Weight-control Information Network.

Midlife Heart Risk Factors Linked to Later Dementia

SOURCES: Rachel Whitmer, Ph.D, research scientist, epidemiologist, Kaiser Permanente division of research, Oakland, Calif.; Alvaro Alonso, M.D., assistant professor, epidemiology, University of Minnesota School of Public Health, Minneapolis; Michelle Mielke, Ph.D, assistant professor, psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; August 2009 Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry; Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders, online

8/4/2009

TUESDAY, Aug. 4 (HealthDay News) -- The things that are bad for your heart in the middle years of life -- high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, diabetes -- are bad for your brain in later years, new research indicates.

High cholesterol levels in midlife were associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia many years later, according to scientists in California and Finland, who tracked almost 10,000 men and women for four decades.

"We found an association not only with high blood cholesterol, but also borderline high levels," said study senior author Rachel Whitmer, who is a research scientist and epidemiologist at the Kaiser Permanente division of research in Oakland. Researchers at the University of Kuopio in Finland also participated in the study.

Total cholesterol levels of 240 milligrams per deciliter or higher in middle age were associated with a 66 percent higher incidence of Alzheimer's disease decades later, the researchers found.

"But that wasn't a cutoff point," Whitmer said. "Around a level of 200, the risk of Alzheimer's disease started to go up."

For those in midlife with borderline-high readings between 200 mg/dl and 239 mg/dl, the increased incidence was 52 percent, according to the study, which was published online in the journal Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders and funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The Californians in the study were more ethnically diverse than the Finnish participants, and included blacks, Latinos and Asians, but "the association between high cholesterol and dementia was the same across all ethnic groups," Whitmer noted.

The other research, reported in the August issue of the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, followed more than 11,000 American participants in a study of atherosclerosis, the hardening of the arteries that can lead to heart attack, stroke and other major cardiovascular problems.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota, the University of North Carolina, John Hopkins and the University of Mississippi Medical Center measured smoking, high blood pressure and diabetes among the participants from 1990-1992. They then tracked them until 2004 to see how many were hospitalized for dementia.

Smokers were 70 percent more likely to develop dementia than nonsmokers; those with high blood pressure were 60 percent more likely, and those with diabetes were twice as likely as those without diabetes to develop dementia. However, there was no link between midlife obesity and later dementia.

The idea behind the study was that "if we find risk factors for dementia, maybe we can develop new treatments, preventive programs to reduce the risk of dementia later in life," said study author Dr. Alvaro Alonso, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health.

Post-mortem studies of brains of people who had dementia often show damage to small arteries, he said. "Maybe there have been small strokes, which are not great enough to cause clinical symptoms, but in time can lead to dementia," Alonso said.

Measures against dementia now usually start when its first signs are detected, Alonso said. "Showing that cardiovascular risk factors earlier in life have an impact on dementia later in life gives another reason why we need to intervene with those cardiovascular risk factors," he said.

The findings of both studies "are an extension of what already has been found," said Michelle Mielke, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, who has done research on the causes of dementia.

"Both papers really point out the need to intervene in vascular factors in midlife," Mielke said. "They are as important in the risk of dementia as they are in the risk of heart disease and stroke."

No new approach is needed, she said, just a renewed emphasis on "exercise, diet, that kind of stuff."

More information

Risk factors for dementia are described by the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Ovarian Cancer Tests Flawed, in Need of New Design, Says Stanford Study

NewsRx.com

8/6/2009

Current diagnostic tests for ovarian cancer are woefully ineffective for early detection of the disease, say researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine. A new study finds that in order to make a significant dent in the mortality rate for the deadly cancer, the tests would have to be able to detect tumors of less than 1 cm in diameter, or about 200-times smaller in mass than those currently used to assess potential new tests. Still, if that hurdle can be overcome, there is good reason to believe that testing could make a big difference: The window of opportunity for treating these clinically undetectable cancers before they become life threatening is surprisingly long: about four years (see also Stanford Medicine).

"We are miles away from detecting the most deadly ovarian tumors at this early stage," said Stanford biochemistry professor Patrick Brown, MD, PhD, "but now we have a chance of actually designing an effective test that will allow us to treat them before they become deadly." If a blood test is to be effective, said Brown, it will likely require identifying new markers that are never produced by normal cells-rather than testing for abnormally high levels of proteins detectable in normal blood, as current tests do. Other possible strategies might rely on new molecular imaging methods or fluid samples from the uterus or vagina-in which tumor markers are likely to be more concentrated.

The research will be published in the July 28 issue of the open-access journal PLoS Medicine. The article will be freely available to anyone after publication.

Ovarian cancer is particularly feared by women and their physicians because the disease is so difficult to detect in its early stages. Symptoms are vague, and often don't occur until the tumor is already several centimeters in diameter. At this point it may have already spread to surrounding organs and tissues. What's more, several published studies have indicated that the current screening tests deliver many false positive results and don't reduce mortality from the disease.

"Reliable early detection would save so many more lives than many new blockbuster anticancer drugs," said Brown, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of the Stanford Cancer Center, who collaborated with the non-profit Canary Foundation to conduct the research. The foundation is dedicated to the early detection of many types of cancer. "If we can do this, which is no small challenge, the potential to go from a less than 20 percent chance of surviving five years to a relatively minor surgery that would have a very high cure rate is huge," he said.

Part of the difficulty in designing an effective test lies in the fact that there is more than one type of ovarian cancer. The most deadly, known as serous ovarian cancer, accounts for about 50 percent of all cases of ovarian cancer, but it is responsible for at least 80 percent of deaths from the disease. In contrast to other types of ovarian tumors, which can grow to be quite large before spreading to other locations, serous ovarian tumors usually metastasize before they are diagnosed.

Cancers are classified, or staged, in part according to the degree of involvement of other organs; the less-deadly forms of ovarian cancer are usually diagnosed at an earlier stage of progression. Because researchers designing the diagnostic tests have assumed that these seemingly early cancers would eventually go on to become more invasive, they considered them to be good models for designing diagnostic tests aimed at detecting ovarian tumors in their infancy. However, these tumors are actually intrinsically different from the tumors that are diagnosed at a lethally advanced stage.

"It dawned on me at some point that we were being somewhat glib about what it was we were trying to detect," said Brown. "What we really needed to know is what the more-dangerous tumors looked like before we knew they were there."

Brown and his co-author, Chana Palmer, PhD, of the Canary Foundation, realized that it was possible to get just such a sneak peak at these tumors by looking at tissue from women carrying a genetic misstep called the BRCA-1 mutation. Because women with the mutation are very likely to develop breast or ovarian cancer, many elect to have their ovaries and Fallopian tubes removed as a preventive measure. Although these women appeared healthy at the time of their surgeries, close examination of the removed tissue indicated that some-about 8 percent, according to Brown and Palmer's analysis of previously published studies-had early, undiagnosed serous ovarian tumors.

The researchers combined the results of several previously published studies to estimate the prevalence, location, size and stage of the tumors. By comparing this information with the incidence of diagnosed serous ovarian tumors in a similar group of women, they calculated that the window of opportunity for early detection and possible successful treatment is about 4.3 years. During most of this time, the tumors were less than 1 cm in diameter; by the time the tumors reached 3 cm in diameter, more than half had advanced to stages III or IV (spread beyond the pelvis). As a comparison, the average diameter of an ovarian cancer tumor at the time of diagnosis is about 10 cm.

Brown estimated that most serous ovarian tumors in the study had progressed to an advanced stage almost a year before diagnosis. In order to halve the number of deaths from serous ovarian cancer, it will be necessary to have an annual screening test capable of detecting tumors about 0.5 cm in diameter-far beyond the capability of any currently available tests.

"This doesn't make me feel gloomy at all," said Brown, who is now studying whether it might be possible to detect ovarian cancer-specific markers in fluids sampled from the vagina or cervix. Such an approach may avoid the extreme dilution that interferes with detection of such a marker in blood samples. Based on the current research, Brown is also pursuing the Holy Grail of a truly cancer-specific molecular marker-a novel protein or DNA sequence that occurs only in cancer cells. Many current cancer-screening tests rely on changes in levels of particular markers that also occur, albeit at lower levels, on non-cancerous cells. It may also be possible to devise imaging techniques that could be useful screening tools, somewhat like mammograms for breast cancer.

Said Brown, "I was much more disheartened before we did this study, when we had no idea what we were looking for."

The Canary Foundation and Howard Hughes Medical Institute funded this study, which will be available after the embargo lifts at:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000114 The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation's top 10 medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service. For more news about the school, please visit http://mednews.stanford.edu. The medical school is part of Stanford Medicine, which includes Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. For information about all three, please visit http://stanfordmedicine.org/about/news.html.

Keywords: , Women, Education, University, Health, Hospitals, Oncology, Research, Consumer, Science, Nanotechnology, Biochemistry, Chemicals, Chemistry, Emerging Technologies, Molecular Imaging, Nanotech, Anticancer Therapy, Biochemistry, Diagnostics, Gynecology, Oncology, Ovarian Cancer, Ovarian Carcinoma, Surgery, Therapy, Treatment, Women's Health, Stanford Medicine.

This article was prepared by Telemedicine Law Weekly editors from staff and other reports. Copyright 2009, Telemedicine Law Weekly via NewsRx.com.

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Good News for Elderly: Happiness Keeps Growing

SOURCE: American Psychological Association, news release, Aug. 7, 2009

8/13/2009

THURSDAY, Aug. 13 (HealthDay News) -- The longer you live, the happier you're likely to be, a growing body of research shows.

Researchers who spoke at the recently concluded annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Toronto said that mental health generally improves with age. Given that the world population of people over 65 is expected to nearly triple by 2050, according to U.S. officials, this should come as good news.

Reporting on several studies of aging and mental health, Susan Turk Charles, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the findings indicate that happiness and emotional well-being improve with time.

Older adults exert greater emotional control, said Charles. Studies show they learn to avoid or limit stressful situations and are less likely than younger adults to let negative comments or criticism bother them.

Charles added that "we know that older people are increasingly aware that the time they have left in life is growing shorter. They want to make the best of it so they avoid engaging in situations that will make them unhappy. They have also had more time to learn and understand the intentions of others, which helps them to avoid these stressful situations."

Another study conducted over a 23-year period examined three groups of people at three different life stages and concluded that emotional happiness grew with age, she said.

These findings may not apply to older adults who feel trapped in distressing situations and those with forms of dementia, Charles said. "We know that older adults who are dealing with chronic stressors, such as caregiving, report high rates of physical symptoms and emotional distress," she added.

In separate reports, Charles and Laura Carstensen, a psychology professor at Stanford University, also noted that social relationships -- or lack of them -- influence how older people respond to stress. Carstensen cited a Swedish study that concluded that people with strong social connections were less likely to suffer cognitive impairment than others. It seems social relationships influence the way that the brain processes information, she said. "These changes have a profound impact on health outcomes," Carstensen said.

To make the most of the coming years, Carstensen offered these tips:

• Think of ways to enjoy the time ahead and try to imagine living 100, healthy, happy years.
• Provide daily routines that reinforce your goals, both in your home and in your social life.
• Develop new activities and relationships, and don't invest all of your emotional energy in a job or a single relationship.

More information

For more about positive aging, visit the American Geriatrics Society.

Stem cells not the only way to fix a broken heart

NewsRx.com

8/6/2009

Researchers appear to have a new way to fix a broken heart. They have devised a method to coax heart muscle cells into reentering the cell cycle, allowing the differentiated adult cells to divide and regenerate healthy heart tissue after a heart attack, according to studies in mice and rats reported in the July 24th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication. The key ingredient is a growth factor known as neuregulin1 (NRG1 for short), and the researchers suggest that the factor might one day be used to treat failing human hearts (see also Research).

"To my knowledge, this is the first regenerative therapy that may be applicable in a systemic way," said Bernhard Kuhn of Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. For instance, he added, people might one day go to the clinic for daily infusions of NRG1 over a period of weeks. "In principle, there is nothing to preclude this going into the clinic. Based on the all the information we have, this is a promising candidate." He emphasized, however, that further studies would be required to demonstrate safety before such treatment could be tested in human patients.

The heart had long been considered an organ largely incapable of repairing itself. Heart muscle cells, also known as cardiomyocytes, do proliferate during prenatal development. Soon after birth, however, the cells become binucleated, meaning that they have two nuclei, and withdraw from the cell cycle, giving rise to the notion that adult cardiomyocytes are terminally differentiated and incapable of further proliferation.

However, recent evidence has shown that adult heart muscle cells can replace themselves at some low level, with perhaps half of the cells in the heart turning over in the course of a lifetime, Kuhn said. The new study provides multiple lines of evidence for this turnover ability - including video of the cells in action - and shows that neuregulin1 can ramp up the process.

In the current study, the researchers first tested the ability of various molecules to spur cell division in cultured cardiomyocytes. If cardiomyocytes are to reenter the cell cycle along the border zone of injury, the researchers surmised that there must be an extracellular signal that triggers the response, Kuhn explained.

They looked to several factors known to drive cardiomyocyte proliferation during prenatal development. Of those, NRG1 had the most significant effect, inducing the division of those cardiomyocytes with one nucleus instead of two.

By manipulating the NRG1 receptor up or down, the researchers showed they could increase or decrease cardiomyocyte proliferation in living animals. Moreover, injecting NRG1 in adult mice sparked cardiomyocyte cell-cycle activity and promoted the regeneration of heart muscle, leading to improved function after the animals suffered a heart attack. That regeneration could not be traced to undifferentiated progenitor cells, they report.

The researchers say they aren't sure whether NRG1 is responsible for the natural repair process, but their findings show that it clearly can enhance it. They also note that the NRG1 receptor and NRG1 itself are always present in the adult heart, though it is not clear if they are in the right place or in sufficient quantities.

"Collectively, we have identified the major elements of a new approach to promote myocardial regeneration," the researchers wrote." Many efforts and important advances have been made toward the goal of developing stem-cell based strategies to regenerate damaged tissues in the heart as well as in other organs. The work presented here suggests that stimulating differentiated cardiomyocytes to proliferate may be a viable alternative that could be developed into a simple strategy to promote myocardial regeneration in mammals."

Before making the leap to the clinic, Kuhn's group intends to further explore how the treatment works at the fundamental level. They will also characterize the regenerative response in pigs, which have more in common with humans than rodents do, before testing the approach in human patients. Ultimately, such a treatment might serve as a useful alternative or complement to treatments designed to seed damaged hearts with regenerative stem cells, Kuhn said.

Keywords: Cardiology, Cardiomyocyte, Heart Attack, Stem Cell Research, Therapy, Treatment.

This article was prepared by Hospital Business Week editors from staff and other reports. Copyright 2009, Hospital Business Week via NewsRx.com.

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