Researchers from Japan reveal that they may just have found a way to repair cardiac damage in patients suffering from chronic heart attack and heart failure.
In a study published in Circulation, researchers from the University of Tsukuba have shown that changing heart cell programming by tweaking the expression of a few key genes can actually reverse the lasting damage caused by heart attacks.
Adult heart cells have very limited ability to form new heart tissue, so when the heart muscle is damaged by a heart attack, the damaged areas are filled in with inflexible scar tissue. The presence of scar tissue impairs heart function and leads to arrhythmias, progressive heart failure and eventual death.
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