Heart Disease Research Paper

Heart disease is a leading cause of mortality around the world. These diseases can range from coronary artery disease, blood vessel diseases, to congenital heart defects. Many patients that are affected by these diseases are treated with pills that have hazardous side effects, surgeries that induce trauma to the patient’s body (stents for vascular intervention, or balloon angioplasty, etc) or heart transplants that are dependent on the patient’s immune system. The bodies of these patients under go so much distress due to multiple surgeries that the idea of having a less invasive treatment seems impossible. Advances in molecular biology have pave the way to make this idea possible with regeneration of the hearts natural tissues through multiple
These diseases can have many defects from faulty ion channels, contractile proteins, structural proteins and/or signal molecules. Cardiac arrhythmias is usually associated with the heart pumping blood inefficiently causing reduced blood circulation within a patient’s body. The goal for the cellular regeneration of heart tissues with the use of site-specific recombination to insert a normal gene to correct the defective potassium ion channel. The potassium channel causes an error in a gene that adds to an error in the protein product. Cardiomyopathy affects the heart muscles directly and become enlarged. As this disease worsens the heart becomes weaker which makes the heart less able to pump the blood through the body and maintain electrical rhythm. To repair the heart from enlarged muscles one of the four genes that encode the development of the contractile proteins need to be mutated to distinguish which gene is crucial and/or competent of causing the
To provide a mechanism to fix this problem a transgenic knockout mice can be studied to see how a mutation of LDL receptors, or deficiency of Apo E, providing the correct gene could potentially reverse the problem. The objective here to use stem cells via microinjection to help regenerate healthy heart tissue that is enlarged through. With vascular endothelial dysfunction the endothelium does not maintain regular vascular tone and blood fluidity. This is disrupted mainly through hypercholesterolemia (high levels of cholesterol in blood). The purpose of fixing these types of diseases is because it is a precursor for the patient obtaining heart disease. So, solving the root of the problem before it gets worse will benefit the patient in the long run with minimal invasive techniques like