Your heart is an incredible machine. It beats more than 100,000 times a day, pumping blood to every part of your body.
But sometimes, it can skip a beat or flutter, much like a bird trapped in a cage. This fluttering, known as atrial fibrillation or AFib for short, isn’t a sign of love or excitement, but a common heart problem.
It causes your heart to beat out of rhythm, too fast or too uneven, which can lead to serious health problems like stroke and heart failure.
Today, the medicines doctors use to treat AFib don’t always work well. Sometimes, they don’t stop AFib from coming back, and they can also have nasty side effects.
A New Discovery about AFib
A group of scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have found something new about AFib that could help us deal with this problem.
They discovered that some of our body’s defence cells, known as macrophages, play a key role in causing AFib. You see, our bodies are like countries.
They have their own armies, called the immune system, that defend us from harmful things like germs. Macrophages are like soldiers in this army. They usually protect us, but sometimes they can cause problems.
In the case of AFib, these macrophage soldiers are doing more harm than good. The scientists noticed that in people with AFib, there are a lot more of these macrophage soldiers in the heart.
These cells cause inflammation, much like when you get a pimple, and scarring in the heart. This messes with the electrical signals that make your heart beat, leading to that dangerous fluttering.
How Scientists Made the Discovery
The scientists at MGH made this discovery by studying the heart tissue from people with and without AFib.
They also used a special kind of mouse, nicknamed “HOMER,” that they had engineered to develop AFib just like humans do.
They observed how the macrophages behaved in these mouse hearts, and how they affected the heart’s rhythm.
What’s more, the scientists discovered that in both humans and mice with AFib, a gene called SPP1 was working overtime in the macrophages.
This gene creates a protein that causes scarring, which worsens AFib. In the HOMER mice, when this gene was turned off, there were fewer macrophages in the heart.
The Future of AFib Treatment
With this new discovery, the scientists believe we can create better treatments for AFib. We could try to stop these macrophages from causing inflammation and scarring in the heart.
Or, we could try to turn off the SPP1 gene in the macrophages, which would reduce the amount of scarring protein they make.
Dr. Matthias Nahrendorf, who led the study at MGH, believes that their findings open up a new path for treating AFib. He and his team are now looking into different ways to do this.
Dr. Michelle Olive, a heart disease expert at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, also thinks this discovery is exciting.
She believes it can help scientists figure out how to combine this new approach with existing treatments to provide better care for people with AFib.
In the end, we hope that this new understanding of AFib can lead us to a day when no heart needs to flutter out of fear, but only out of joy and excitement.
If you care about heart health, please read studies about better treatment of irregular heartbeat and how much should you worry about that ‘extra’ heartbeat.
For more information about heart disease, please see recent studies about hormones that may reduce inflammation, irregular heartbeat, and results showing a simple way to reduce irregular heartbeat problems.
The study was published in Science. Follow us on Twitter for more articles about this topic.
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