Normal and pathophysiology related to the heart and vascular system
You may have read the commentary “Stem Cells Repair Injured Hearts” and then heard about the National Institutes of Health (NIH) decision to suspend a clinical trial using stem cells to treat heart failure due to oxygen deprivation, as occurs in a heart attack. The work highlighted in the commentary is by different authors and … Read more
Heart muscle has limited ability to regenerate. This is why heart attacks cause permanent heart damage. A goal in cardiovascular medicine is to induce healing rather than scarring, especially in patients with large areas of heart damage that compromise heart function. One strategy under investigation is injecting immature heart muscle cells, called cardiomyocytes, into the … Read more
Some anti-aging supplements include compounds, like nicotinamide riboside, that increase nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD: oxidized NAD+ and reduced NADH) and stilbenoid compounds, like resveratrol or pterostilbene, that are anti-oxidants and regulators of protein function. The findings that resveratrol inhibited human platelet aggregation and prevented cancer cell proliferation in culture and cancer in mice created excitement … Read more
Coordinating growth with heart health ensures that the heart can keep up with the demands placed on it by the body. A recent study (1) identified a molecule called growth differentiation factor 15 [GDF15, also known as macrophage inhibitory cytokine 1 (MIC1)] that was released from the heart that signals to the liver to inhibit … Read more
Although genomic (DNA) and transcriptomic (messenger RNA) data are easier to collect and analyze, these are only two of the relevant types of “omic” data that are important for understanding disease and the response to treatments. Proteomic, metabolomic, and lipidomic data are also contain information that can be used diagnostically, prognostically, in developing treatment … Read more