title: Search for magic patches that heal the broken heart.
abstract: Heart failure caused by acute myocardial infarction remains a great challenge in clinical practice due to the high mortality rate associated with this pathology. Current therapies mainly aim to prevent expansion of the initial infarct lesion; however, approaches to effective regeneration of functional myocardium remain elusive. A recent breakthrough is that scientists have shown a collagen-based cardiac patch containing follistatin-like 1 can not only attenuate infarction-induced heart injuries, but also stimulate proliferation of endogenous myocytes. These results raise the possibility that the intrinsic cardiomyocyte division, albeit a rare phenomenon, may be therapeutically manipulated and augmented for treating myocardial infarction and heart failure, at least in mice.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathophysiology, School of Medicine, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong Province, China.
authors.forename: Fan
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Jiang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D006333:Heart Failure / Q000150:complications / Q000473:pathology / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D008516:Medicine, Chinese Traditional / Q000379:methods*; D009203:Myocardial Infarction / Q000150:complications