The American Heart Association estimates 80 million American adults, one in every three, have at least one form of heart disease.
Nearly six million of these adults suffer from heart failure, an irreversible condition that often requires a heart transplant. It can be caused by many factors, including long-term heart disease and multiple heart attacks.
Because blood supply is cut off from muscle cells in the heart during an attack, that tissue can suffer permanent injury or death.
"The fundamental problem with heart attacks and heart failure is that the heart loses functioning muscle cells, and when you lose those functioning muscle cells, the heart goes into failure," cardiologist at the University of Miami, Joshua Hare M.D., said. "Up until now we've had no therapy that can replace those missing cells."
Now, doctors are turning to stem cells to re-grow heart tissue.
"The overall goal of stem cell therapy for the heart is to replace those missing cells and rebuild the heart or restore the heart back to what it was originally," Dr. Hare said.
 |  |
 | |  |
| | | | | | | |
Stem Cells
News 8's Todd Boatwright shows us how doctors are opening the door to stem cells without performing operations.
 
| | |
| | | | | |
|
To treat the heart, doctors inject stem cells either into the bloodstream, the coronary artery or directly into the organ. Until now, most research involving this treatment has been in patients who have just suffered a heart attack, before scar tissue has formed.
Doctors at the University of Miami are testing a new method of stem cell delivery that they hope is beneficial for patients with heart failure.
"We're really at the beginning of a new field of inquiry, asking the question, 'Can we treat patients whose heart attack may have been three months ago, three years ago or even longer?'" an interventional cardiologist at the University of Miami Allan Helman, M.D., said.
The new technique involves a novel, corkscrew-shaped catheter through which surgeons inject bone marrow stem cells directly into the heart.
"The advantage of a screw-in needle is that there is better retention of what's been injected into the muscle," Heldman said.
As with other types of catheters, patients don't have to undergo surgery to receive the treatment. While the patient is lightly sedated, a catheter is threaded through a blood vessel into the aorta, and ultimately into heart muscle. Doctors navigate the heart during surgery using magnetic resonance imagining (MRI).
