Study Suggests Heart Muscle Cells Regenerate After Heart Attack

Join Our Community of Science Lovers!

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, heart muscle cells do regenerate after heart attacks, researchers have found. In recent years, hints that heart cells can perform this healing feat have trickled in. Now the new findings, described today in the New England Journal of Medicine, provide the most compelling indication yet of heart cell regeneration.

Researchers at New York Medical College examined heart muscle cells, or myocytes, taken from patients four to 12 days after they had suffered a heart attack, sampling both the zone near the site of the heart attack and parts farther away from the damaged muscle tissue. To determine whether the heart was healing or not, the team looked for a protein known as Ki67, which is expressed in the nuclei of myocytes during division. Myocytes from the heart attack border zone, they found, multiplied 70 times faster than those in a normal heart; the cells farther away from the diseased zone multiplied 24 times faster than normal.

Future efforts, team leader Piero Anversa suggests, should investigate the source of the dividing myocytes. To that end, preliminary results hint that they might originate from stem cells in the heart, he reports. If so, this could lead to future treatment options. "If we can prove the existence of cardiac stem cells and make these cells migrate to the region of tissue damage," Anversa muses, "we could conceivably improve the repair of damaged heart muscle and reduce heart failure."

Subscribe to Support Independent Journalism

Great science journalism requires human expertise, time, effort and creativity. And it costs money. That’s why I and the journalists here at Scientific American hope you’ll join our community.

When you subscribe, you are supporting staff and freelance journalists who are passionate about telling science stories that are true, important and compelling. Our editors and reporters are often experts in their fields, which means they understand the nuances of big discoveries and can untangle the breakthroughs from the hype. With a subscription, you are also supporting rigorous fact-checking to ensure the words we publish are precise and accurate. And you’re supporting original illustrations, graphics and photos that bring you closer to an advanced laboratory, an ice sheet in Antarctica or a space mission in orbit. You’re helping us craft other types of high-quality journalism as well: Our newsletters are carefully written, edited and curated by staffers you have or will come to know and love. Our Science Quickly podcast is based on original reporting, collaboration with editors and scientists and exacting production.

Subscriptions keep this engine running so we can continue to deliver thoughtful, rigorous and independent science journalism to you. In an era of viral misinformation, this work is crucial. If you value what we do, I hope you’ll consider joining us as a subscriber

Thank you,

Jeanna Bryner, Editor in Chief, Scientific American