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Bioengineered Mouse Heart Gets a Beat Using Human Cells
cylonlover writes "Heart transplants have given new life to thousands, but are only an unfulfilled hope to thousands more due to a shortage of donor organs. With the goal of meeting this shortfall, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have bioengineered a mouse heart in the lab that beats on its own. The mouse heart had its cells replaced with human cells, offering the potential of growing custom replacement hearts that wouldn't be rejected by the recipient."
i've been worried that we might run out of mice, but with this new technology, we can now save those mice who need heart transplants. We won't have to wait for a donar mouse to be killed in an accident any more! It's also hard to convince them to sign a donor cars, as very few of them know how to write.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
...so this research is misguided in that sense. See: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Now please start working on a replacement for my liver.
Seriously though, I wonder how long it will be before brain diseases such as Alzheimer's, Pick's disease and the like are considered the most catastrophic things that can happen to you as other body parts become easier to grow and replace.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
The mouse heart had its cells replaced with human cells, offering the potential of growing custom replacement hearts
The mouse will have to be rather big...
http://www.heartattackproof.com/ ... The proof is in the results. The patients in Dr. Esselstyn's initial study came to him with advanced coronary artery disease. Despite the aggressive treatment they received, among them bypasses and angioplasties, 5 of the original group were told by their cardiologists they had less than a year to live. Within months on Dr. Esselstynâ(TM)s program, their cholesterol levels, angina symptoms, and blood flow improved dramatically. Twelve years later 17 compliant patients had no further cardiac events. Adherent patients survived beyond twenty years free of symptoms."
"A groundbreaking program backed by the irrefutable results from Dr. Esselstyn's 20-year study proving changes in diet and nutrition can actually cure heart disease
And:
http://www.heartattackproof.com/huffpost.htm
"Beginning in 1985 I initiated a study of seriously ill coronary artery disease patients. Their nutrition became plant based without oil. Their cholesterol levels plummeted. Their angina disappeared. Their weight dropped. I have reported this study at 5 years, 12 years, and 16 years, in the peer reviewed scientific literature and again beyond 20 years in my book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. In some of the patients we had follow up angiograms (x-rays) of previously blocked arteries demonstrating striking disease reversal, which is a testament to my often quoted statement âoeThe truth be known coronary artery disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never exist and if it does exist It need never progress.""
So, it's actually those who won't pay attention who are "killing people" in the sense you mentioned. Those people who don't want to look at the evidence, or don't want to work to gather more.
But, it is indeed very profitable to kill people via misleading them that heart surgery will help much (as two of my family members suffered through and then died shortly afterwards for a personal anecdote). As Dr. Fuhrman points out, cardiac interventions are a major hospital profit center. Doctors made $100K or more (in insurance) from my family, but did not have to attend the funerals caused by their bad advice, and neither did they have to experience first-hand the physical or mental suffering their interventions caused.
Note that Fuhrman's, Orish's, Esselstyn's and McDougal's approaches are all better than the "Mediterranean diet" as much as that does indeed help: ..."
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/103/13/1823.full
"Diet is a cornerstone of cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention and treatment efforts. Step I and Step II diets are widely recommended as the first line of CVD intervention.1 At the core of this dietary guidance are the recommendations to decrease saturated fat and cholesterol and to consume more fruits, vegetables, and whole grain products. Information from an extensive database, especially regarding saturated fat, indicates that these diets significantly lower blood cholesterol levels, a major risk factor for CVD. Consequently, it is beyond debate that these diets reduce CVD risk.
But what these MDs I mention go beyond is showing how you can not just prevent but *reverse* clogged arteries in the heart with diet.
So, if you had heart disease right now (which you probably do if you are like most older US Americans an eat a Standard American Diet), which would you rather have:
* a painful operation, months of recovery, and then six years of generally crappy quality of life eating the same old junk doing various restricted activities, or:
* making a major change to what you eat, which in six weeks tastes as good overall as what you ate before, and then, quite possibly, living twenty years in great health doing lots of physical activity?
See also:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap!"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
so called heart is beating on its own... reckon the scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine are having something to do with it
G: they can write now.
J: on paper?
G: well, scrolls.
J: See ya in a few days.
G: and don't drink. you know what happens when.. alright, seeya
Every time I think I have to quite smoking and drinking and all those other things I do in the mornings something like this comes to the rescue.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I know what the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association say about diet preventing cardiovascular disease. I know what those (mainstream, establishment) doctors wrote in the Washington Post about Bush's stent. I don't dispute that. What I do dispute is that diet can reverse cardiovascular disease to the extent that Fuhrman claims.
This is America. We have the First Amendment. Anybody can publish a book, no matter how stupid or poorly-supported its claims are.
What I want is an article in a major peer-reviewed journal, like The Lancet, that supports Fuhrman's claims. There isn't any. Fuhrman is happy to cherry-pick The Lancet, but he can't cite an article in The Lancet or any place else that supports his claims.
Ornish and Atkins published articles in JAMA. They've demonstrated small but significant benefits from diet. However, they doesn't claim to reverse heart disease the way Fuhrman does. Fuhrman hasn't published his results in The Lancet, JAMA, or any other major journal.
I'm using your post as a teachable moment. I'm trying to explain how science works.
Scientists submit their results to peer-reviewed journals. The journals send their results out to experts in the field to review their work. If an article appears in JAMA or Cardiology, you know that at least a handful of experts have reviewed the article and decided that its methods and logic were solid, and there weren't any obvious misrepresentations.
Fuhrman can publish his own stuff in a book and say whatever he wants. He can make misleading claims about what the scientific literature says. He can confuse issues like angioplasty and coronary bypass. He can use anecdotes. That's why a book like that isn't reliable the way a peer-reviewed journal is.
I looked up Esselstyn's work on Pubmed and I read his 1999 article in American Journal of Cardiology. I'll give him credit for publishing his results. He had 24 patients and no control group. He says he gave them cholesterol-lowering drugs. (But he doesn't say what the cholesterol-lowering drugs were.) So he's mixing the effect of diet with the effect of drugs. Yes, Lipitor will lower cholesterol. Yes, some researchers (and drug companies) believe that statins can reverse atherosclerosis. But he hasn't published any data since 1999, as far as I could see. If he ever publishes something in NEJM, JAMA, Lancet or BMJ, I'll read it there.
I haven't seen anything there in any peer-reviewed journals that shows plant-based diets can reverse most heart disease.
I've never understood why the organ shortage couldn't be solved, or at least improved, by making it an "opt out" system instead of an "opt in" system. My understanding is that the organs are thrown away anyhow when the body is prepared for a funeral. If people really want to not donate that's OK, just let them opt out. Anyone know more about this and why it might not be a good idea?
Quotes I collected here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline"."
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"
"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
As with Ignaz Semmelweis advocating handwashing after doing autopsies to prevent surgeons causing disease that killed their pregnant patients, change is a tough sell. Semmelweis ended up in an insane asylum. Doctors could not accept they could be unclean (plus the suggestion of using carbolic acid was painful). Only decades later did handwashing become accepted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
Similarly, modern day highly paid heart surgeons are not going to accept how much harm they are doing compared to advocating nutritional interventions. Studies begin with anecdotes and observations. Those abound.
Who benefits by studies done on nutrition reversing clogging of arteries? Not most highly paid doctors. Most researchers or universities would not benefit either from such studies, because nutritional interventions as simple as eat more whole foods can't be patented. So why would anyone in a position to do so suggest that such studies be funded? Maybe some dedicated public servant in a government medical bureaucracy might; but we've seen from Manning and Snowden etc. how long radicals with a public conscience last in big institutions (not to say some might not keep a lower profile or pick legal strategies for going forward and maybe indeed make some change eventually).
To go back to the car analogy, people pushing a position love to say "there is no evidence for the alternative" when the reason there is no evidence is the politics of funding. So, where is the peer reviewed evidence that fixing an oil leak and refilling an engine with oil will prevent it from melting down? None that I know of. It is just common sense to someone who has worked in the automotive field and seen a lot of cars go by. Yet, by your logic, you could argue that there is plenty of (making this up) evidence through peer reviewed studies funded by General Motors that disconnecting the oil light leads to motorists who are in less pain of worry for a time. And plenty of (making this up) peer reviewed evidence funded by Ford that replacing engines when they melt down leads to people being able to keep their cars running on average for six more years. Those would be profitable studies to fund.
Clogged arteries lead to a host of problems, including probably dementia and cancer from lack of adequate oxygen getting to the tissues. Replacing a clogged heart does not fix thos
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of mice hearts.....
But I heard mouse-grown human hearts only work on guys named Mickey.... :-/
With bullshit like the boiled frog argument ...
"A gruesome tale
If a frog is placed in a pan of water, it often just sits there. If the pan is heated, ever so slowly, the frog may never notice that the water temperature is rising. He will âoeget used toâ the increasing heatâ"and may be unaware that anything is amiss. Even with no barrier to his escape, he is as likely as not to sit in the panâ"and boil to death. His sensory capabilities may fail to adequately warn him that action is required for his survival, and he may only survive if the heat is turned down."
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp
Why should we believe anything else this quack says?
Esselstyn has many peer reviewed publications:
http://www.heartattackproof.com/publications.htm
Yes, I saw all those publications. I looked them up on Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed which everyone who understands the medical literature knows about. The latest one, which I discussed above, is from 1999, which is pretty old. In that paper, Esselstyn used diet and cholesterol-lowering drugs, as I said above. Cholesterol-lowering drugs like Lipitor (atorvastatin) will lower a patient's cholesterol dramatically, and extend life in certain patients, with or without a low-cholesterol diet. If he wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his diet, he should have had one group on the diet, and one group on a normal diet. That study doesn't prove anything.
I have read the work of James Randi, Marcia Angell, John Ioannidis, and Ignaz Semmelweis. I've talked to some of them. I doubt that you've read the actual original articles that you're quoting. You're quoting out of context, you're using their work to prove your own beliefs that they don't agree with, and you're getting their ideas all wrong.
Are you suggesting Dr. Joel Fuhrman is lying (or self-deluding) about this patient? It only takes one anecdote to prove a possibility:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/HeartDisease.aspx
"John Pawlikoski is a typical patient I see everyday. I am reporting his case here because he has been my patient for 10 years now, so I can report on his long-term results. He first came to see me at the age of 65 with a history of steadily worsening angina. His chest pains interfered with his daily life, so he was unable to perform physical work. He had a stress thallium test which suggested multi-vessel coronary artery disease. He then underwent a cardiac catherization, which revealed a 95 percent stenosis of the left anterior descending artery and had diffuse blockages throughout the left circumflex. He had normal heart function. His cholesterol was 218, with an LDL of 144. He weighed 180 pounds. He was on two medications - one for high blood pressure and nitroglycerin to relieve chest pains.
Within a few weeks of following my dietary recommendations, his chest pains ceased, and he no longer required nitroglycerin. In two months, his weight dropped to 152, a loss of 28 pounds in eight weeks. He remains exactly at 152 pounds today, 10 years later. He has been entirely well these last ten years and is extremely physically active. He takes no medication, and his blood pressure is normal. His LDL cholesterol runs about 80, and his stress test has normalized too. He has no signs or symptoms of heart disease."
Or that Esselstyn is lying (or self-deluding) about these patients?
http://www.heartattackproof.com/patientprofiles.htm
More lies, including by a comment here which might be a paid shill?
"Caldwell Esselstyn MD - Reverse Heart Disease Study"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X31QKDhQUY
"yycman1 wrote: I'm 45, and it will be one year in Nov. since I switched to a vegan diet to address my high cholesterol and blood pressure. ï After just 5 months, I was off 5 different medications...2 for high cholesterol, 2 for high blood pressure and one for prostate. My doctor was so impressed, he told me I made him want to eat better. A vegan diet really does work to reverse cholesterol and blood pressure issues. I was inspired by Bill Clinton to try this. I also lost 18 lbs. without exercising. Amazing!"
Or that Ornish is lying or self-deluded here?
http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/features/can-you-reverse-heart-disease
"In his 2007 book The Spectrum, Ornish describes patients waiting to undergo a heart transplant -- those with the worst possible damage -- who enrolled in his program while on the transplant list. Some of them, he says, improved so much that they no longer needed a transplant.
"Our studies show that, with significant lifestyle changes, blood flow to the heart and its ability to pump normally improve in less than a month, and the frequency of chest pains fell by 90% in that time," Ornish says. "Within a year on our program, even severely blocked arteries in the heart became less blocked, and there was even more reversal after five years. That's compared with the natural history in other patients in our study, in which the heart just got worse and worse.""
And T. Colin Campbell is full of it, too?
http://www.tcolincampbell.org/courses-resources/article/reversing-heart-disease-with-diet/category/cardiovascular
Still, as Upton Sinclair said:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not und
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.bluezones.com/programs/blue-zones-communities/albert-lea-mn/
http://www.bluezones.com/live-happier/thrive-centers/
"Our team of experts Dan Burden, Dr. Brian Wansink, and Dr. Leslie Lytle, empowered the community to make a few small lifestyle and environmental changes. Citizens improved in four areas: eating better, becoming more active, connecting with one another and finding a greater sense of purpose, and reaped the positive benefits of revitalizing their bodies, their spirits and their town.
The community made a variety of changes including adding workplace wellness policies, revised restaurant menu and vending machine offerings, community gardens, walking clubs, walking school buses and new hiking trails.
Community Successes
* Life expectancy increased an average of 3.1 years
* Participants lost a collective 12,000 pounds
* An average 21% drop in absenteeism by key employers
* City employees showed a 40% decrease in health care costs"
Yes, people are up against tough odds. But isn't the point of a "health care" as opposed to "sick care" system to help people succeed in implementing known effective solutions towards greater health?
Related resources on diabetes reversal with various slightly different approaches -- McDougal may be easier for many than Fuhrman as far as diet -- and medically suprvised fastign may work for others:
http://www.drmcdougall.com/med_hot_diabetes.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Diabetes.aspx
http://www.rawfor30days.com/
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/05/20/5-steps-to-reversing-type-2-diabetes-and-insulin-resistance/
http://drbass.com/disease-cure.html
http://www.healthpromoting.com/condition/diabetes
All have similarities. By reducing foods with high glycemic loads, in the diet, while also reducing a person's body fat, and also improving the nutrient density of the food so the human body works better in general, and also getting adequate vitamin D and exercise which also help improve bodily functioning, most Type 2 diabetics can reach the point where they do not need supplemental insulin or other drugs because their needs for insulin have fallen to what their bodies can manage without aid.
But yes, it can be hard. Maybe the biggest part of the issue is that doctors are trained to write permission slips for unhealthy behavior (called prescriptions) instead of being trained in how to help patients change their lifestyle. How many hours of training does the typical MD have in lifestyle discussions? Especially in the ten minutes at most a typical doctor will spend with a typical patient. More than ten minutes, and a doctor's partners will yell at him or her.
And where is the sick care system's profit in curing diabetes? There is so much money to be made in glucose test strips, drug prescription renewals, insulin pump operations, amputations, and so on. There is a fundamental conflict of interest here.
Meanwhile, when a patient does not make the change, the doctor can just blame the subsequent health problems on genetics and the patient's lack of willpower to follow whatever advice was haphazardly given. Convenient for the well-paid doctor.
Contrast with the advice from the True North Health Center which includes training on how to cook healthier ood (as do other like McDougal's approach):
http://www.healthpromoting.com/
http://www.drfuhrm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.