Study: Heart Cells Could Repair Damaged Hearts

After a heart attack the damage was thought to be done and irreversible. But a new study says with a little help, the heart can heal itself.

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Mending a broken heart, once thought inconceivable, could someday become a reality.

Doctors had thought that damage done to heart through heart attacks or other disorders were irreversible because cells in the heart, unlike in the skin and brain, could not divide and make copies of themselves.

But a new study, appearing in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine (news - web sites) debunks the idea that cardiac muscle cells cannot regenerate themselves.

Cells Continue To Divide After Attack

"This study opens up the possibility that we may in the future be able to treat myocardial infarction [heart attacks] by stimulating the heart's own repair capacity," said Goran Hansson, professor of cardiovascular research at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, commenting on the research.

The study is the strongest evidence to date that human heart muscle cells continue to divide after a heart attack, according to researchers. Previous studies had suggested that only animal heart cells could regenerate.

"It has long been assumed that when the heart is damaged, heart muscle cells do not regenerate and the damage is permanent," said Dr. Claude Lenfant, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, a component of the National Institutes of Health (news - web sites) that partially funded the study with the National Institute on Aging.

Researchers studied myocytes (heart muscle cells) from the hearts of 13 patients, four to 12 days after their heart attacks, and from the hearts of 10 patients who did not have cardiovascular disease. Samples were obtained from the zone near the site of the heart attack and from a more distant site from the damaged tissue.

The scientists found that the number of myocytes multiplying in diseased hearts was 70 times higher in the border zone and 24 times higher in the remote area.

Searching for the Mother Heart Cell

The challenge now is to identify those ancestor or premature stem cells that give rise to these multiplying myocytes, so researchers can figure out a way to stimulate them to grow and repair damage.

"Are these cells a sub-population of known cells that retain the capacity to divide, or are they multiplying cells that originate from stem cells present in the heart?" asks lead author of the study Piero Anversa, professor of medicine and director of Cardiovascular Research Institute at New York Medical College, in Valhalla, N.Y.

There are preliminary indications that primitive cells like stem cells exist in the human heart but more research needs to be done to find them.

"If we can prove the existence of cardiac stem cells and make these cells migrate to the region of tissue damage, we could conceivable improve the repair of damaged heart muscle and reduce heart failure," he said.

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