Heart failure is a disorder that afflicts millions of Americans. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have demonstrated in animals that applying a pacemaker's mild electrical shocks to push the heart in and out of normal synchronized contraction for part of each day may be an effective way to slow down the progression of heart failure. In the study published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers say recent experiments in dogs show that the therapy, called Pacemaker Induced Transient Asynchrony, or PITA, reverses cellular damage to the heart's response to hormones, like adrenaline, and fixes the damage to the motor proteins in the heart muscle that generate force. Essentially, the therapy uses a pacemaker over several hours to alternately 'zap' a region of heart muscle with electrical shocks so it beats out of synch, and then reverses this so the heart beats again in synchrony for the rest of the day.
‘Applying a pacemaker's mild electrical shocks to push the heart in and out of normal synchronized contraction for part of each day may be an effective way to slow down the progression of heart failure.’
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David Kass, a professor of medicine and biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said, "It's the process of going back and forth that is important. In a way, we've attached a light-switch timer to a pacemaker - like the automatic timers used in homes to turn lights on and off - but here it flips the pacemaker between synchronous and out-of-synch states each day. We're very excited about prospects for this therapy because if further research confirms its effectiveness and safety, it's relatively easy to implement. The pacemaker hardware already exists, and with some software upgrades, we may have a treatment that would benefit many, many people." According to Kass, congestive heart failure, marked by enlargement and weakness of the heart muscle, affects tens of millions of people worldwide and remains a leading cause of hospitalization and death. In approximately 25% of patients, the disease is worsened by so-called dyssynchronous contraction resulting from delays in electrical activation between the two sides of the heart.
Kass said, "For heart failure patients who develop dyssynchrony, the heart ends up out of tune, like a car with a broken timing belt." A decade ago, his team pioneered cardiac resynchronization therapy, which uses a pacemaker to deliver electric pulses to both sides of the heart so it's retuned, or synchronized. Over the years, they discovered that resynchronization therapy also improves the heart's tissue, including changes in the way that calcium flows through heart muscle cells, the way that receptors on the heart respond to hormones, like adrenaline, and the way that the heart's force-generating fibers performed. Kass said, "We discovered that this wasn't just tuning the engine - the engine itself wasn't the same anymore. At a very basic level, the molecular processes that control heart contraction had improved."
These observations led Kass and his colleagues to develop PITA and begin their latest animal experiments. They would ultimately be aimed at the 75 percent of heart failure patients who do not have dyssynchrony and so are not eligible for a resynchronizing pacemaker.
In the new experiments with dogs, the researchers first induced heart failure in the animals - 10 received PITA, and 13 served as heart failure controls - by delivering atrial pacing, or small electrical pulses to the right atrium of the heart, 200 times per minute, 24 hours a day for four weeks. After four weeks, the PITA treatment group received six hours of electrical pulses per day to the right ventricle at the same 200-times-per-minute rate and then atrial pacing for the remaining 18 hours of the day. The control group received an additional four weeks of continuous atrial pacing. An additional eight dogs received no atrial pacing at all and were kept as controls.
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Kass said, "We liken PITA to immunization, where you''re given just a bit of a bug to help you mount a robust immune response that protects you against a more serious infection. Too much dyssynchrony exposure is also bad for the heart; we knew that, but here we show that a little bit each day can stimulate beneficial effects."
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Source-Newswise