IF YOU suffer a heart attack, a dose of your own stem cells could help repair the damage. Preliminary studies by two groups suggest that injecting stem cells directly into damaged hearts helps to restore their function.
Heart attacks, one of the West’s biggest killers, are usually caused by fatty deposits that block the arteries supplying blood to heart muscle. This starves a chunk of muscle of blood, and eventually kills it. An operation to bypass the blockage can restore blood flow and prevent further damage, but much of the dead heart tissue never recovers, leaving the patient disabled. “If a large area is lost, they…
