Heart Attack
Also known as myocardial infarction, a heart attack happens when the blood vessles that service the heart become blocked. With no blood flowing to the cells around those arteries, the cells die causing portions of the heart muscle to die as well. Once these cells are lost, they are not replaced, therefore causing permanent damage. Current research indicates that it may be possible to regrow the "damaged heart cells, heart tissue, valves and establish new blood supply to them." They would do this with the help of stem cells. Stem cells are the cells from which all other cells originate. They have the potential to develop into many different types of cells. These cells could be designed to develop into myocardial cells. They could then be used to replace the damaged heart tissue.
Read more about this topic: Cardiac Muscle Cell
Famous quotes containing the words heart and/or attack:
“When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)
“One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)