Injecting stem cells may check heart failure: Research

Washington, Dec 1 (UNI) Heart patients can heave a sigh of relief as a new research suggests that injecting adult stem cells into the heart following an attack strengthens the artery and may reduce the chance of failure following an attack.

Heart attack leads to the partial death of heart tissues.

Researchers now attempt to replace the dead cells with new stem cells.

Liesbeth Winter of the Leiden University Medical Center explained that this cell therapy ensured that less tissues would die and the remaining heart cells would function better.

Mr Winter used the 'Epicardium Derived Cell' (EPDC), which plays a crucial role during embryonic heart development. The embryonic EPDCs provide cells for the connective tissue skeleton of the heart and for the walls of the coronary arteries. EPDCs also played an important role in the formation of a thick, compact heart muscle wall. Without EPDCs, the heart muscle would remain very thin and the embryo would die, Science Daily reported.

The experiment was first tried on a mouse where adult human EPDCs (cells) extracted from the atrium of the heart was transplanted to a mouse heart that had suffered an infarction.

The animal treated with these cells showed symptoms of better heart function than those treated without these cells, both in the short term and in the longer term.

Two weeks following cell transplantation, the treated hearts contained more blood vessels, the heart muscle cells exhibited an increased activity of DNA damage repair, and the wall was thicker where the infarct had occurred.

UNI