The following is an excerpt.
THURSDAY, Feb. 21 (HealthDay News) — When it comes to treating heart failure, the ultimate hope is to develop a therapy that repairs the damaged heart muscle.
Now, an early study hints at a way to do that by harnessing the body’s natural capacity for repair.
Heart failure is a chronic, progressive condition where the heart cannot pump bloodefficiently enough to meet the body’s needs, which leads to problems like fatigue, breathlessness and swelling in the legs and feet. Most often, it arises after a heart attack leaves heart muscle damaged and scarred.
In the new study, researchers were able to use gene therapy to modestly improve symptoms in 17 patients with stage III heart failure — where the disease is advanced enough that even routine daily tasks become difficult.
View the original article here: Gene Therapy Shows Early Promise for Heart Failure
