Neutrophils Provoke Damaging Inflammation and Scarring Following Heart Damage

The heart is not a very regenerative organ. Following damage, scarring rather than reconstruction results, leading to reduced function. This contributes to the high mortality resulting from a heart attack. While preventing heart attacks is a much better goal than clearing up the damage afterwards, the research community is nonetheless very interested in understanding how to sabotage this scarring process. Interfering in the activities of immune cells has seemed a promising path forwards. Heart attacks provoke lasting inflammation, and such unresolved inflammation is disruptive of regenerative processes. In today's research materials, scientists discuss the role of neutrophils in creating an inflammatory feedback loop between bone marrow and heart following heart injury. Suppressing this feedback loop reduces the scarring that takes place following a heart attack in mice. This sort of inappropriate immune activity may be a useful target for approaches to enhance regeneration in other tissues as well. First-responder cells after heart attack prompt inflammation overdrive Neutrophils are definitely a key part of the problem. In an earlier study, researchers found that heart-attack patients with higher numbers of neutrophils in their blood upon hospital admission, or even after doctors restored blood flow, had the worst outcomes. However, because neutrophils are vital to all wound healing and infection fighting, their first-responder role in heart repair ca...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs