The human heart may have a hidden ability to repair itself

A left ventricular assist device (LVAD) allows the hearts of patients with heart disease to continue working properly, helping the organ pump blood to the rest of the body. According to the Vaud university hospital centerthe LVAD is particularly interesting for patients waiting for a heart transplant. And it could have helped to shed light on an unknown regenerative capacity of the organ…

Six times greater cell renewal with LVAD

Indeed, researchers from the Karolinska Institutet, in Sweden, have just discovered an unsuspected and very interesting benefit to this device. According to their study, published in the journal Circulation, The LVAD increases the heart’s ability to repair itself by producing new muscle cells. It would even be higher than that of a healthy heart.

In people who do not have heart disease – and whose heart is therefore said to be healthy – the ability to produce muscle cells, called myocytes, is very limited. During their work, the scientists confirmed that this cell renewal was lower in patients with severe heart failure. However, they also discovered that cardiac patients fitted with an LVAD had six times greater myocyte regeneration than people with healthy hearts.

Towards new treatments for patients with heart failure

For now, researchers are only at the observation stage. “In the existing data we do not find an explanation for this effect, but we will continue to study this process at the cellular and molecular level, indicates Olaf Bergmann, principal researcher of this study, in a communiqué. The results [de l’étude] suggest there may be a hidden key to triggering the repair mechanism of the heart itself”.

Ultimately, this work could therefore make it possible to find new treatments for patients with serious heart diseases. In France, heart failure affects 1.5 million people, particularly those over 60, according to Health Insurance which specifies that this figure could increase by 25% every four years.