Researchers at Karolinska Institute in Sweden, have resolved a controversial biomedical mystery of whether the human heart is capable of generating new cells, or is equipped from birth with a number of specific cells, which decreases with time, without no replacement occurs.
The attractions findings published in a recent issue of prestigious journal Science, show that, indeed, in the course of a human life is replaced less than half the number of heart cells, cardiomyocytes.
A detailed analysis of this process could be very beneficial to find new treatment to improve the status of the tissues damaged by myocardial infarction and to rethink treatment strategies.
“Investigate the inside of an organ as precious as the human heart is not anything,” said Professor Jonas Frisén the magazine ..
In this case, the team “Instead of labeling cells to analyze its future development retrospectively determined their age,” said Professor Frisén.
This new approach, also used in dating archaeological purposes, was based on an unlikely opportunity: a geophysical phenomenon.
The surface nuclear bomb tests conducted during the Cold War, between 1955 and 1963, resulted in mass production of radioactive isotopes of carbon-14. It was only a matter of time that high levels of carbon-14 from the atmosphere is transferred to the cells of plants, animals, humans and other life forms on Earth.
Researchers have used the presence and concentration of this isotope for dating of cell regeneration, carbon dating heart cells of people born before and after nuclear bomb tests to determine when carried out DNA synthesis of those cells.
DNA
According to these researchers, “When a cell is born in the human body at some time in the last decade, genomic DNA integrates its carbon-14 in a concentration that corresponds exactly to the atmospheric level at the time. Thus by measuring the presence of carbon-14 in the DNA of cells is possible to read a date written in the DNA of cells and determine when they were generated.
It was thus possible to infer, retrospectively, the age of cell renewal and deduce that there must have been. ”
20% of cell-cardiomicitos-renewing each year
After four years of study, Frisén and his team have established that cardiomyocytes, which constitute about 20% of the cells of the human heart are renewed annually at a rate of 1% after 25 years of age. This rate is gradually reduced to about half at 75 years of age.
“Our data indicate that the heart can generate new cardiomyocytes,” said Frisén. “I think this is very interesting because it shows the possibility of understanding in the future, how it regulates this process and, potentially, physicians might modulate this regulation to stimulate the generation of new cardiomyocytes.
Obviously, this would be beneficial after the loss of cardiomyocytes, for example following a stroke.
He highlighted the attractiveness of drug therapies that could be introduced to enable the generation of cardiac cells.
The research that led to these discoveries have been carried out by scientists from institutions in France, USA and Sweden
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