(Circulation. 2000;102:e9041.)
© 2000 American Heart Association, Inc.
Cardiovascular News |
Cardiovascular News
American Heart Association 2000: Touching Hearts Through Science
The 73rd Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association (AHA) opened Sunday in the "Big Easy" (New Orleans, La), but the problems and solutions faced by clinicians and researchers treating patients with heart disease are anything but easy. As the association’s president reminded colleagues during the opening session: "The completion of the human genome project was a race not to the finish line, but to the starting line."
In the future, the president said, there will be new medicines and new procedures for treating the various forms of heart disease. However, in the current healthcare environment, many patients cannot afford the treatments available now. It is a reasonable question to ask whether they will be able to afford those of the future.
The promise of new therapies was demonstrated early in the Sessions when leaders in the field described novel new approaches to solving the problems of heart failure. Philippe Menasche, MD, of the Hopital Bichat in Paris has already used cell therapy to treat a 73-year-old heart failure patient who was not a candidate for surgical or percutaneous revascularization.
On June 15, 2000, he and his colleagues topped 7 years of preclinical research when they took a sample of muscle from the patient’s thigh and grew the myocytes in culture. Then, the expanded group of cells was reimplanted into the scarred tissue of the patient’s heart.
"It is now 5 months later, and there is some objective
evidence of new contraction," said Dr Menasche during a press
conference at