THURSDAY, June 23, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- Research has shown that stem cell therapy can regrow damaged cardiac tissue in patients after a heart attack. However, that same research found the cutting-edge procedure also raised the risk for dangerous heart arrhythmias.
"It was a potential case of the cure being worse than the disease," Dr. Eduardo Marban, chief of cardiology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and its Heart Institute, said in a prepared statement.
Now, a new study suggests that gene therapy can help avoid that danger.
In laboratory research, at team at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore discovered that the source of these arrhythmias were myoblasts, adult stem cells taken from the patients' own healthy skeletal muscle.
Reporting in the June 23 online issue
of Circulation Research, the researchers say they minimized arrhythmias by using gene therapy to replace a key protein called connexin 43, which was found to be missing in heart muscle fibers that grew after stem cell transplants.
Connexin 43 makes up the gap junctions between heart muscle cells, allowing the cells to communicate and to regularly expand and contract.
"We believe that combining gene therapy with adult stem cell transplantation, we can go a long way to prevent the development of potentially fatal arrhythmias in patients who will have these myoblast transplants," Marban said.
More information
The American College of Physicians has more about the use of stem cells to repair heart attack damage.
