The heart can heal itself after a heart attack

The heart has its secrets—and one of its biggest is that it can repair itself after a severe heart attack.

Normally, the heart cannot regenerate its cells, but this all changes after it’s suffered catastrophic damage from a bad heart attack.

It repairs itself by creating new myocyte muscle cells, and this extraordinary healing is accelerated if the heart attack survivor is fitted with a heart pump.  With a pump, the heart regenerates at a rate that is six times greater than seen in a healthy heart, researchers from the Karolinska Institute have discovered.

“There might be a hidden key to kick-start the heart’s own repair mechanism,” said Olaf Bergmann, one of the researchers.  Although the heart pump is an artificial stimulant that starts the healing process, the researchers believe there could be a natural way to encourage new growth in the heart for everyone, whether or not they’ve suffered a heart attack.

Right now, they’re baffled by the phenomenon.  “In the existing data, we cannot find an explanation for the effect, but we will now continue to study this process at a cellular and molecular level,” he added.

Now they know the heart can heal itself, the Karolinska researchers are looking at new therapies that can start the healing process even before someone suffers a heart attack.  If they can unlock the secret, heart transplants and other interventions could become a thing of the past.

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