Medical Breakthroughs, Research, and News

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Study Finds First Evidence That Heart Muscles Can Regenerate

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.

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Youngest Cancer Patient Treated with 'Nano-knife' Is Now Cancer-Free

Following three rounds of chemotherapy, a 2-year-old Englishman has become the youngest patient ever treated with ‘nanoknife’ technology.

This still-experimental cancer treatment helps to neutralize tumor sections via electrical currents.

George, from Camden, was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma—a cancer of the liver and bile duct last year.

Dr. Sam Godfrey, science engagement lead at Cancer Research UK spoke to the BBC about the treatment, calling it cutting-edge, and explaining how it uses electrical currents to ensure surgeons get a better margin of clearance around a tumor.

This “cutting-edge surgical treatment will inform the treatment of children around the world,” he said.

“The surgeons managed to remove all the tumor and had clear margins all the way around the removed section of his liver,” said George’s father, Johnathan. “This was the news we’d been hoping and praying for.

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Lupus is a *****. May be less of one down the road.

'Exciting' New CAR T-cell Treatment for Lupus Could End the Need for Lifelong Medication

Using a cancer treatment method, a small study has seen sufferers of Lupus go into remission such that they were able to halt their regular medication within just three months.

The results were hailed as a groundbreaking achievement in the treatment of Lupus, a debilitating life-long disease experienced by 5 million people around the world, and the results even bear the hallmarks of a potential cure.

Two studies, the first published in Germany, and the second in the UK with patients of the most severe form of the disease, refractory systemic lupus erythematosus, (SLE) saw patients receive CAR T-cell therapy, which genetically modifies a patient’s own immune cells ex vivo.

They are then injected back into the patient carrying an important mission in their genetic code. In almost all use cases of CAR T-cell therapy, this has been the targeting of cancer cells that use signaling molecules to evade detection by the immune system. But in this case, it was used to target the faulty biological equipment that causes the disease.

Lupus is an autoimmune disorder, meaning that defects in a patient’s genetics lead to their immune system targeting normal, healthy cells. Lupus is driven by a particular kind of immune cell called a B cell, and the treatment addressed T cells with orders to attack B cells carrying the defect.

In the German study, which was conducted in 2022, all five patients experienced a depletion of B cells, which eventually came back through normal cellular replenishment in the bloodstream, but without a return of Lupus symptoms.

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Potential help for those with Eczema.

Itching Solution: New Approach Could Treat Inflammatory Skin Conditions Like Eczema with 'Huge Benefits'

A new way of treating common inflammatory skin conditions such as eczema is on the horizon, according to a new study.

American researchers discovered that a compound called SYM2081 inhibited certain cells that drive inflammation in mice and human skin samples.

They say it paves the way for new treatments to prevent itching, hives, and other symptoms of skin conditions—such as eczema and rosacea—driven by mast cells.

Rosacea is a long-term skin condition that mainly affects the face. It may cause acne-like pimples, broken blood vessels, skin thickening, and facial flushing.

“I’m really excited about the clinical possibilities of this research,” said study senior author Professor Daniel Kaplan, of the University of Pittsburgh. “Currently, there aren’t a lot of good therapies that target mast cells, so we think that our approach could potentially have huge benefits in many skin conditions, including rosacea, eczema, urticaria, and mastocytosis.”

He explained that mast cells are filled with tiny granules “brimming” with histamine and other compounds that act as signals or activators of inflammatory pathways. When mast cells are activated, the granules spill open, releasing compounds that trigger a suite of immune responses.

Kaplan says the process—known as degranulation—is essential for protection against threats such as bee venom, snake bites, and pathogenic bacteria, but erroneous activation of mast cells also triggers allergic reactions, including swelling, hives, itching, and in severe cases, anaphylaxis, according to the findings published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

In a previous paper, Kaplan and his team found that neurons in the skin release a neurotransmitter called glutamate that suppresses mast cells. When they deleted the neurons or inhibited the receptor that recognizes glutamate, mast cells became hyperactive, leading to more inflammation.

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Good news for coffee drinkers

Coffee Drinkers Less at Risk of Head and Neck Cancers, New Research Suggests

The last 15 years have seen a remarkable change in the clinical considerations of coffee.

Studies examining the caffeinated beverage for its potential effects on more than several different biological systems, from the kidneys to mood, have pinned it as something like a health drink.

Now, research from the University of Utah published in the journal Cancer has shown that people who drink 4 cups of caffeinated coffee per day were at a lower risk of developing head and neck cancer.

The seventh most common form of cancer worldwide, head and neck cancer had an almost 50% mortality rate among 750,000 patients in 2020—the last year worldwide data on head and neck cancer was collected.

The team from Utah examined 14 older studies covering around 9,500 head and neck cancer patients and almost 16,000 cancer-free people to see how the diagnosis rates stacked up when the patients’ coffee consumption was factored in.

People who drank more than 4 cups a day “had 17% lower odds of having head and neck cancer overall, 30% lower odds of having cancer of the oral cavity, and 22% lower odds of having throat cancer.”

A 2016 meta-analysis found that coffee consumption was linked to a reduced risk of oral, pharynx, liver, colon, prostate, endometrial cancer, and melanoma but an increased lung cancer risk, while a separate paper from the same year showed a dose-dependent reduction in risk of colorectal cancer.

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Carrots May Be Key to Unlocking Microbiome's Diabetes Defense System

An anti-fungal agent produced naturally by carrots has been suggested in a new study to substantially aid in the regulation of blood sugar.

The authors suggest that carrots may be a useful, low-cost, non-pharmaceutical diabetes treatment, although as the study was only conducted in mice, they stress further studies are needed.

Americans are crazy about dieting. Health enthusiasts and those concerned about their weight have practiced every diet imaginable, but health researchers rarely have the time and funding to properly investigate their supposed benefits.

Among these many eating patterns are ones that aim to help the proliferation of beneficial microbes that live throughout the human GI tract. Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) recently found that two bioactive compounds in carrots were linked to better composition in the microbiome, including species that aid in the regulation of blood sugar.

“Everything we eat affects the composition of gut bacteria,” explains project coordinator Morten Kobæk Larsen, associate professor at the Department of Clinical Research, SDU. “Consuming carrots shifts the gut bacteria towards a healthier balance, benefiting mice with type 2 diabetes.”

The benefits of a healthy gut microbiota are manifold. One key feature to remember is that beneficial gut bacteria help to break down fiber in the gut, producing short-chain fatty acids in the process which our cells need for various processes including preventing colon cancer, reinforcing the gut lining, and regulating energy metabolism.

The study from SDU studied the effects of carrots over 16 weeks in two groups of mice—one that was diabetic and another that wasn’t. One group was fed with a diet containing a supplement of freeze-dried carrot powder, which was found by study’s end to have had a positive effect on blood sugar regulation.