Broken hearts mend with ‘patch’

A team of Israeli scientists has developed a potential way to fix the damage from heart attacks.

A “patch” has been made from heart muscle that can be used to fix scarring left over from a heart attack.

Writing in the journal PNAS, the scientists describe how the technique strengthened the hearts of rats that had suffered heart attacks.

The “patch” was grown in abdominal tissue first, then transplanted to damaged areas of the heart.

This experiment is the first to show that such patches can actually improve the health of a heart after it has been damaged.

The scientists measured an increase in the size of the muscle in damaged areas, and improved conduction of the electrical impulses needed for the heart to pump normally.

Heart failure

Heart attacks usually cause irreversible damage to heart muscle. If people survive, then the damaged muscle can cause another serious condition called heart failure.

Read more . . .

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Tags: heart attack, heart attacks, heart failure, heart muscle, hearts, Innovation, irreversible damage, israeli scientists, patches

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 5:09 pm and is filed under BBC, Innovation, Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.