Quoted message said:Subject: Re: Zzz The Ignorance About Arteries
From: "Rich Shewmaker" [email hidden]
Date: 10/18/2003 9:05 AM Mountain Daylight Time
Message-id: <[email hidden]>
Quoted message said:The human body "works" just fine on a balanced, supplement free
diet.
Since Linus Pauling advocated vitamin C for everyone and since the AMA has now
begun to recommend one a day supplements .. the article below means nothing to
... you ..
<<snip>>
"A really big issue is going to be whether we can encourage the heart to fix
itself, or whether we will need to implant cells of some sort," Lee says. "That
is an important and unresolved question for this century, given the prevalence
of heart failure."
<<snip>>
Source: American Heart Association
Date:
2003-04-01
Vitamin C Transforms Mouse Stem Cells Into Heart Muscle Cells
DALLAS, April 1 – Vitamin C helped convert mouse embryonic stem cells growing
in the laboratory to heart muscle cells, researchers report today's rapid track
publication of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Rapid track articles are released online early because they have major clinical
impact or represent important basic science discoveries. This basic-research
discovery could lead to future research on ways to treat people suffering from
damaged heart muscle.
"Although the findings of this study are very preliminary with respect to their
impact on human lives, this line of research has enormous implications for the
future care of thousands of patients who develop heart failure each year," says
Robert O. Bonow, M.D., president of the American Heart Association.
"Identifying mechanisms to transform stem cells into differentiated heart
muscle cells is an important step toward clinical reality."
Richard T. Lee, M.D., senior author of the study, says: "We have been taught
for decades that when your heart cells are dead, they are dead and there is
nothing we can do about it. We are excited about anything suggesting that we
can grow more heart cells."
Lee and his colleagues tested 880 bioactive substances – including drugs and
vitamins – approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to see if
they stimulated the mouse stem cells to become heart muscle cells. The cells
were genetically altered to give off a fluorescent bright green color when
viewed under a microscrope if they had become heart muscle cells.
"We only got 1 out of the 880 to light up, and that was from ascorbic acid, the
chemical commonly known as vitamin C," says Lee, an associate professor of
medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston,
and a lecturer in biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
He stresses, however, that the finding is preliminary and it should not
encourage people to take vitamin C hoping to strengthen or protect their
hearts. "There is no clinical evidence that it would help," he says. The
ability to grow or implant new heart muscle could save or improve the quality
of life of countless people suffering from heart failure – the inability of a
weakened heart to pump enough blood to supply the body. About 550,000 new cases
and more than 51,500 heart-failure deaths occur each year in the United States
as the result of a damaging heart attack, genetic disease, or other causes.
Embryonic stem cells are derived from the very early stages of fetal
development and can become any type of cell in the body through a process
called differentiation. Efforts to stimulate the differentiation of stem cells
to specific types of cells have drawn growing research attention in recent
years.
Working with a well-established line of mouse embryonic cells grown by first
author Tomosaburo Takahashi, M.D., Ph.D., they placed about 2,000 stem cells
each in tiny "wells" and treated each well with a different one of the
FDA-approved compounds.
The stem cells had a gene inserted that would fluoresce bright green if the
cell converted into the heart-muscle cell.
Beyond finding the green glow of the vitamin C-treated cells, the researchers
detected several other important pieces of evidence that the stem cells had
converted to heart muscle.
For example, they found that both cardiac myosin and actin (proteins involved
in relaxing and contracting muscle) were present in the cells. They also
detected three other heart-muscle genes that activated in proper sequence. The
differentiated cells also beat spontaneously and rhythmically.
Vitamin C's beneficial activity has been attributed to its ability to
neutralize oxidants, which are damaging substances produced naturally by the
body. However, other antioxidant compounds tested, including vitamin E, did not
trigger the development of heart cells.
"This suggests that the effect of vitamin C on cardiac differentiation is
independent of its antioxidant effect," Lee says.
He and his colleagues repeated their experiment many times, always with the
same results. "The real significance of the study is that it indicates that we
will be able to find other ways to generate heart cells from stem cells more
efficiently," Lee says. "It also raises interesting questions about the role of
vitamin C in the development of the embryo's heart."
The team is investigating other so-called "chemical libraries" that contain far
larger numbers of compounds than the group initially tested.
"A really big issue is going to be whether we can encourage the heart to fix
itself, or whether we will need to implant cells of some sort," Lee says. "That
is an important and unresolved question for this century, given the prevalence
of heart failure."
Co-authors are P. Christian Schulze, M.D.; Bernadette Lord, B.S.; Ryan M.
Fryer, Ph.D.; Satinder S. Sarang, Ph.D.; and Steven R. Gullans, Ph.D.
This research was partly funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood
Institute.
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This story has been adapted from a news release issued by American Heart
Association.
Who loves ya.
Tom
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