Broken heart Heart attacks don’t always kill, but the damage they cause can be irreparable, causing long-term health problems and changing lives for ever. The study, into the use of stem cells to repair the ravages of a heart attack, is still in its early stages, but the results so far look very promising
The results of the study, carried out at hospitals in the USA, are published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. They could mean that doctors will have a repair kit, not just for the heart, but possibly also for damage to the liver, lung and spinal cord too, as well as improving treatment for diabetes.
It’s all about stem cells, immature cells that have the capacity to turn into specialised cells such as retinal cells that help us see. The Cardiovascular Division and the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, The Rush University Medical Centre and the other centres involved carried out the study with a group of patients who had suffered a heart attack in the previous 10 days.
Patients were injected with either a placebo or with adult mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) from a healthy human donor, which were then purified. The patients were followed for two years to see how they fared. When the results were compared, the researchers found that the patients who had received the stem cells were noticeably better than the placebo group. After six months the MSC patients were four times as likely to have improved in condition generally, were able to pump more blood with each heartbeat, had one quarter the number of dangerous arrhythmias as the placebo group, and hadn’t experienced any serious side-effects.
It’s a step forward in stem cell study. Researchers say it is the strongest evidence so far to indicate that adult stem cells can actually differentiate, or turn into heart cells, to repair damage. "The results point to a promising new treatment for heart attack patients that could reduce mortality and lessen the need for heart transplants," said Dr Gary Schaer, head of the Rush Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory and study principal investigator at Rush.