# Heart

[ur-daily-inspiration]

— caught in a dreamy fog

[reasonsforhope]

"A study looking at the bearers of artificial hearts found that a subset of them can regenerate heart muscle tissue—the first time such an observation has ever been made.

It may open the door to new ways to treat and perhaps someday cure heart failure, the deadliest non-communicable disease on Earth. The results were published in the journal Circulation.

A team of physician-scientists at the University of Arizona’s Heart Center in Tucson led a collaboration of international experts to investigate whether heart muscles can regenerate.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart failure affects nearly 7 million US adults and is responsible for 14% of deaths per year. There is no cure for heart failure, though medications can slow its progression. The only treatment for advanced heart failure, other than a transplant, is a pump replacement through an artificial heart, called a left ventricular assist device, which can help the heart pump blood.

“Skeletal muscle has a significant ability to regenerate after injury. If you’re playing soccer and you tear a muscle, you need to rest it, and it heals,” said Hesham Sadek, director of the University’s Sarver Heart Center.

It was previously thought that when a heart muscle is injured, it could never grow back.

“Irrefutable evidence of heart muscle regeneration has never been shown before in humans,” he said. “This study provided direct evidence.”

The project began with tissue from artificial heart patients provided by colleagues at the University of Utah Health and School of Medicine led by Stavros Drakos, MD, PhD, and a pioneer in left ventricular assist device-mediated recovery.

Teams in Sweden and Germany used their innovative method of carbon dating human heart tissue to track whether these samples contained newly generated cells. The investigators found that patients with artificial hearts regenerated muscle cells at more than six times the rate of healthy hearts.

“This is the strongest evidence we have, so far, that human heart muscle cells can actually regenerate, which really is exciting, because it solidifies the notion that there is an intrinsic capacity of the human heart to regenerate,” Sadek said.

“It also strongly supports the hypothesis that the inability of the heart muscle to ‘rest’ is a major driver of the heart’s lost ability to regenerate shortly after birth. It may be possible to target the molecular pathways involved in cell division to enhance the heart’s ability to regenerate.”

In 2011, Sadek published a paper in Science showing that while heart muscle cells actively divide in utero, they stop dividing shortly after birth to devote their energy to pumping blood through the body nonstop, with no time for breaks.

In 2014, he published evidence of cell division in patients with artificial hearts, hinting that their heart muscle cells might have been regenerating because they were able to rest.

These findings, combined with other research teams’ observations that some artificial heart patients could have their devices removed after experiencing a reversal of symptoms, led him to wonder if the artificial heart provides cardiac muscles the equivalent of bed rest like a person needs when recovering from injury.

“The pump pushes blood into the aorta, bypassing the heart,” he said. “The heart is essentially resting.”

Sadek’s previous studies indicated that this rest might be beneficial for the heart muscle cells, but he needed to design an experiment to determine whether patients with artificial hearts were actually regenerating muscles.

Next, Sadek wants to figure out why only about 25% of patients are “responders” to artificial hearts, meaning that their cardiac muscle regenerates.

“It’s not clear why some patients respond and some don’t, but it’s very clear that the ones who respond have the ability to regenerate heart muscle,” he said. “The exciting part now is to determine how we can make everyone a responder, because if you can, you can essentially cure heart failure.

“The beauty of this is that a mechanical heart is not a therapy we hope to deliver to our patients in the future—these devices are tried and true, and we’ve been using them for years.”"

-via Good News Network, December 31, 2024

[woundsoflove]

I want to fall asleep with you, feeling you in every inch of my mind, knowing that we can spend an eternity together.

[mrpeoplepleaser]

Definitely haha

Late night conversations is how you catch feelings for people you're supposed to be just friends with.

[silent-insanities]

Kiss me like the world is ending.

[littlealienproducts]

Anti-Valentine. One of a kind embroidery by Vivienne Strauss. by vivstrauss

[baharmisali]

İmkanım olsa sana güzel bir geçmiş de alırdım.Baktıkça burulmazdın, gülümserdin hep.

[alwayswiselight]

Human beings and the earth are so minute compared to the endless beauty of the Cosmos.

Sharpless 2-190, Within the Heart

[heartbeat-eras]

Her First Workout Of The Year...

Well actually her first workout in a while if I'm honest... I know I should get this little pumper working harder more often, but *insert all the excuses* haha. She's had a lot of challenges over the last year with medication, then changes in them, and her Mum (me) not feeling up to training her like I should. Despite of that, she keeps working hard, beating away strong for me. She's not as slow as she once was, nor does she recover as quickly, but she still keeps doing what she does best!

So this rec actually had about 30 min of warm up before because my mic didn't like me today and kept cutting out 5 min in. She was already beating strong at the start of the recording and we went straight into an incline workout. Listen as my breathing becomes faster and how my heart reacts to the climb over about 20 mins.

At the end I was well and truly spent. The recovery is short because I couldn't gauge time and needed to sit down. I have also removed minimal background noise so not lose the breath sounds from it.

Can you count how fast she got? How do you think she handled her first trial of the new year?

I think someone posted a while ago about tracking how working out changes their heart over time. I think I've also seen people post their work out rates and how they are getting lower over subsequent weeks. I'm not saying I will do that (coz my adhd will probably have other plans) but I like this idea and I may just try to use this as a diary to encourage me to keep at it and get this little girl healthy. (but totally don't hold me to this because I'm notorious for not being consistent haha)

Steth - Cardio IV

Location - Pulm

[1five1two]

Nahum B. Zenil.

[allaboutrings]

9k Gold Topaz Heart Ring

[c-heart]

My resting heartbeat

[woundsoflove]

I want you, not just in moments of passion, but in every quiet second, in every word, and in every heartbeat.

[missdiamantata]

Dark, mi sei cosí vicino che guardo il tuo cuore sulla mia mano....

[webdiggerxxx]

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