Author: Tina Hesman Saey / Source: Science News
There’s some bad news for people who have suffered heart attacks: Healing may not come from within.
Researchers have debated for years whether hearts have their own stem cells. If they existed, those cells could produce new heart muscle cells and might help the organ repair itself after injury. Now that debate may finally be over. After following the fate of dividing cells in the hearts of mice, researchers have concluded that there are no heart stem cells.
Instead, heart attacks and other injuries to the organ signal immune cells and scar-forming cells called fibroblasts to divide and attempt to close the wound, the team reports online December 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Human hearts probably also lack stem cells, evidence suggests.
“This study is fairly definitive that there is not a population of stem cells within the heart that gives rise to new muscle,” says Deepak Srivastava, a cardiologist and developmental biologist at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco who was not involved in the study.
Other researchers agree the study seems to settle the matter. “It can certainly seem like this is a letdown,” says Ronald Vagnozzi, a cardiac cell biologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. On the bright side, “this paper is a rich resource of information” that may help scientists…
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