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There's something unusual about the X-ray above of a man who went to an Italian hospital's emergency room: he had two hearts, and he got double heart attacks!
It turned out that a few years earlier, the man had undergone a procedure known as a heterotopic heart transplant. Unlike an orthotopic transplant, in which one organ is removed and another put in its place, a heterotopic transplant pairs a new organ with a diseased one. [...]
In the case of the ailing Italian, reported in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, the transplant team had mated his new heart with his malfunctioning old one. Chambers and blood vessels of the two hearts were married so that the new heart could support the old one.
But there’s a risk, explained Vukmir. “You can develop two independent heart rhythms, especially in a scenario where one heart gets a little better,” he said.
As it turns out, nature has its own method for transplanting stem cells. When a pregnant mouse has a heart attack, her fetus goes to work to help repair the damage! The experiment mated female lab mice with males who had the genes to produce green fluorescent protein (GFP). Around half the embryos produced also had the ability to produce the protein. This way, scientists could track fetal cells separately from maternal cells. Then heart attacks were induced in the pregnant mice.
When the scientists examined the female mice’s heart tissue two weeks after the heart attacks, they found lots of glowing green tissue—cells that came from the fetus—in the mom’s heart. Mice who had heart attacks had eight times as many cells from the fetus in their hearts as mice who hadn’t had a heart attack did, meaning the high volume of fetal cells was a response to the heart attack.
What’s more, the embryo’s stem cells had differentiated into various types of heart tissue, including cardiomyocytes, the rhythmically contracting muscle cells that produce a heartbeat.
Doctors have observed that women who experience weakness of the heart during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth have better recovery rates than any other group of heart failure patients. This study suggests that fetal stem cells may help human mothers, as well as mice, recover from heart damage. It may also explain another curious clinical observation: The hearts of two women who suffered from severe heart weakness were later found to contain cells derived from the cells of a male fetus years after they gave birth to their sons.
As if insecure people haven’t had enough things to worry about, medical researchers have just added one more to the pile: they’re more likely to get heart attacks.
A new study shows such relationship uncertainties, known as "insecure attachment," were linked to a higher risk for a number of health conditions, including stroke, heart attack and high blood pressure. [...]
The study "suggests that attachment is associated with these fairly concrete and negative health outcomes," said study researcher Lachlan McWilliams, of Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Pain conditions are somewhat subjective experiences in that people can experience more or less pain, while something like a heart attack is a distinct, clear cut event, he said.
And since these insecurities are thought to develop at a young age, the work adds to "a growing body of research that suggest that negative experiences in childhood have a wide range of negative outcomes in terms of mental health and [physical] health later in life," McWilliams told LiveScience.
Many communities have enacted smoking bans in public places, some of which have been in effect for several years. How is that affecting our overall health? According to an analysis of studies, the bans are significantly cutting the rate of heart attacks in those communities.
“By lumping 11 studies together, we have increased the certainty that smoking bans really do reduce the risk of heart attack,” lead author Dr David G Meyers (University of Kansas School of Public Medicine, Kansas City) told heartwire. Meyers and colleagues report their findings online September 21, 2009 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Meyers says there are some additional messages from this review. Although they found, on average, a 17% reduction in AMI, this figure is “deceptive,” he says, because they also showed—in longer-term studies—a 26% decrease in heart attacks per year that the ban had existed. So this proves “the longer a community bans smoking, the greater the effect.” It also appears the people who seem to derive the greatest benefit from the bans are younger and often predominantly female—likely those working in the hospitality and entertainment industry, he says.
(image credit: Flickr user bennylin0724)
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