An attempt to repair damaged heart !!!!!

Heart is the vital part of Human body. This is the first line that you come across if you read any article or an essay about Human heart. It is the chief organ which pumps the all important blood to all parts of the body and thereby supplying oxygen to other organs through blood and ensures proper functioning of the body. If there is any problem associated with the heart the pumping activity is affected and thereby supply of oxygen for several parts will be disturbed and leads to the death of the human cells and ultimately the victim. This kind of situation is popularly known as Heart attack or a Heat stroke. It is one of the serious problem that the world is confronting and this is the reason for majority of deaths in the world. A health survey estimated that by 2030 around 23 million people every year will be losing their lives only because of heart disorder. So this is one of the challenging task posed by the nature to address the problem of Heart failures. Several techniques were developed, tested and implemented and some of them are still in the labs testing for the next fraction of accuracy but nature seems to be the ultimate winner. This article focuses on the  latest on going and efficient techniques to fight this problem.

What happens during a heart attack ??
As already described it is the situation where the heart fails to pump blood and damages its own tissue during the process. We all know that heart is made of muscle and the cells that form the heart muscle are called "CARDIOMYOCYTES" . When a heart attack occurs some of the muscle cells(Cardiomyocytes) will be damaged. The bottleneck in case of the heart is that unlike other vital organs like Liver and Skin the cells which are damaged will not be replaced by new cells. In case of heart if Cardiac muscle gets damaged it gets replaced by a Scar tissue instead of a fresh muscle. In short it creates a patch (scar tissue) of dead cells. This Scar tissue is very dangerous and affects the beating rhythm of heart and also poses a risk of heart attacks in the future. Its quite common that victims with heart attack for the first time are less prone to death than the victims with multiple heart attacks and the scar tissue is the reason behind it which reduces the heart activity with multiple attacks. This is what happens during a heart attack damage due to an attack will be permanent.
Proposed treatments to repair damaged heart:-
Out of all there is no concrete procedure to tinker the Scar tissue of a victim and to raise the heart activity of that victim. The best of all is a replacement of heart. It is a quite tedious process and the donors of heart are also very rare and mere thousands of heart transplants happen around the world in an year. In addition to the rarity and cost involved in this process there must be a lot of medication needed to suppress the effect of antibodies (Substances which fight foreign organs and viruses in our body ) because the antibodies treat the transplanted heart as a foreign organ and starts fighting with that and it will take some time for them to realize the truth and get used to it. So a lot of medication is required to achieve this. Other important method is to take tissue from the healthy part of the heart and grow it in the lab and again injecting back into the scar tissue. This is better process than a transplant in terms of risk involved but it cannot raise the heart activity and also failed to prevent further attacks.
Latest advancement in fighting heart failure:-
Nature poses a lot of challenges on us, every challenge is answerable, Nature itself holds the hint to solve that challenge and it is our responsibility to search for that hint in the existing nature and proceed in the right way. This was observed by Deepak Srivastava of Gladstone Institute, California. He investigated the genes that are responsible for the controlled growth of an embryo in mother's womb and the answer comes out to be in the form of three genes namely Gata4, Mef2c, TbX5 (GMT in short). These trio (GMT) is responsible for the growth of your heart when you are an embryo inside your Mom's womb. He thought that by introduction of these genes into the Scar tissue may facilitate the growth of cardiac muscle (just as happened when you are an embryo). His thought actually pulled out dramatic results. When this technique was implemented on the rats surprisingly the "FIBRO BLAST" cells that form the Scar tissue were transformed into the "CARDIOMYOCYTES" which forms the Cardiac muscle. Repairing the damaged cells and transforming it into a new cell at the portion of injury is very much desirable and it also suppresses the chance of further attacks. So to take this study a bit further his team is testing it on hearts of pig which closely resembles the human heart. It is a bit complicated when it comes to human heart says Deepak and there was a bit of opposition for this method from some experts because Deepak and team used a kind of virus to carry the payload (GMT) to the scar tissue which may harm the victim and he is quite confident that in near future the virus can be replaced with a drug that carry the payload to the targeted region. With these advancements still in lab we have to wait for some more time to save at least a few lives in danger from the clutches of heart failure.
                                     Source : www.bbc.com