Temple Researchers Find Early Success In Method To Prevent Future Damage After Heart Attack
By Lynne Adkins
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Local researchers are finding early success in a method to prevent future heart damage after a heart attack.
Patients who suffer heart damage from a heart attack can have problems such as heart failure years later. Researchers want to prevent that outcome.
Dr. Steven Houser, Chair of Physiology at Temple University School of Medicine, has found that injecting cells into a mouse heart after a heart attack can repair some of the damage and prevent future heart problems.
"The cell comes from the bone so it would have to be obtained either from a bone biopsy or one of the things we're exploring is using a drug that would displace the cells from the bone and then we could collect it in the blood stream," said Dr. Houser.
He says the next step is to test the research on larger animals with more human characteristics.
