Traditional Medicine Could Slow Heart Disease Development
Time halted during the European Football Championship last summer. When football player Christian Eriksen unexpectedly fell, passed away, and was resuscitated on live television, the buzzing anxiety that had filled the air vanished in a matter of seconds. And in no time, millions of people all over the globe were aware of the danger posed by cardiovascular diseases, the leading cause of mortality in the western world, according to the World Health Organization.
When the heart fails in young athletes, the condition ARVC is often to blame. Half of all cases of sudden cardiac arrest in athletes occurring during physical activity are thought to be caused by ARVC.
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen provide new insights into a process involved in the development of the disease in a recent study. In fact, they also present a viable treatment method, according to Professor Alicia Lundby, whose research team led the new study.
“We have identified a previously unknown disease mechanism in ARVC, which adds a completely new layer of information that no one knew about,” she says.
The previously unknown mechanism is a defect in the nucleus, deep within the heart cells that are responsible for heart muscle contraction. The defect sets off a chain reaction that leads to cell death.
“Based on the new insights we obtained, we identified a molecule that may be able to slow down disease progression,” says Alicia Lundby from the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen.
Alicia Lundby and her colleagues studied heart biopsies from healthy individuals and from patients suffering from hereditary ARVC. They performed a deep and so-called molecular profiling of the heart samples and identified the molecular differences between the hearts. Based on these measurements, they formulated hypotheses about the causes of the disease and tested them on mice models and stem cell-derived heart muscle cells.
The study was recently published in the journal Circulation.
Molecule From Tulip Tree as Treatment?
The researchers found that by activating a specific molecule, sirtuin-3, they could slow down disease development. They, therefore, started a hunt for a molecule with that function.
And with honokiol, they found it. Honokiol is a natural product extracted from the bark and leaves of the tulip tree and has been used e.g. as a pain killer in traditional medicine in some parts of Asia.
“When we tested honokiol on our mouse model, it really did slow down the development of the disease. The same happened in our stem cell-derived heart cells. We do not know if it works the same with humans, but the fact that we can confirm the effect in two different models makes it very interesting,” says Alicia Lundby.
“It is really satisfying to take a project all the way from very basic science measurements, through interpretation of the results to coming up with a possible strategy to mitigate the disease progression and finally demonstrate that it works. To me, this is truly the essence of the type of research I am excited about, namely to shed light on the mechanisms behind heart disease such that we can propose novel treatment strategies,” she says.
“Doing the types of studies we do, analyzing several thousands of proteins at a time, is challenging when trying to understand what the changes we measure actually mean. This part of the work requires delving into the scientific literature. So you read and read and read. And talk to colleagues, think, and read some more. It is months of detective work. And it’s both stimulating and frustrating at times. Because it is certainly not straightforward.”
The hard work does not stop here. The researchers have already launched a follow-up study to examine their findings more closely.
“We believe our findings are significant, and we want to determine whether they can actually help patients. The next step for us is to determine whether the mechanism we identified is present in all ARVC patients,” says Alicia Lundby.
Reference: “Loss of Nuclear Envelope Integrity and Increased Oxidant Production Cause DNA Damage in Adult Hearts Deficient in PKP2: A Molecular Substrate of ARVC” by Marta Pérez-Hernández, Chantal J.M. van Opbergen, Navratan Bagwan, Christoffer Rasmus Vissing, Grecia M. Marrón-Liñares, Mingliang Zhang, Estefania Torres Vega, Andrea Sorrentino, Lylia Drici, Karolina Sulek, Ruxu Zhai, Finn B. Hansen, Alex Hørby Christensen, Søren Boesgaard, Finn Gustafsson, Kasper Rossing, Eric M. Small, Michael J. Davies, Eli Rothenberg, Priscila Y. Sato, Marina Cerrone, Thomas Hartvig Lindkær Jensen, Klaus Qvortrup, Henning Bundgaard, Mario Delmar and Alicia Lundby, 12 August 2022, Circulation.
DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.060454
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9 Comments
Should specify it’s the Tulip Magnolia and not the Tulip tree.
‘Dave” is suffering from Donald -itis.
Please disregard his remarks.
Are you serious? It’s beyond obvious that the jab is causing all the heart problems. The writers of this article should hang with everyone else when the truth gets out
No, because I was diagnosed with the hereditary heart disease 2 years BEFORE the jabs even began!!
‘Dave” is suffering from Donald -itis.
Please disregard his remarks.
It’s actually ARVD – Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia, an idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy restricted almost entirely to the right ventricle. Nobody uses ARVC (except maybe journalists) and is ready detected by standard echocardiography. In fact virtually all of the hidden pathologies that can cause sudden death in young folks engaging in sports are easily found with an echo. Every high school, college and professional athlete should have an echo prior to participating in competitive sports, I suspect some college and pretty much all professional athletes have had an echo. So says this cardiologist.
Thanks for this arvd. I suspect first world professional atheletes have access to echo cardiogram or graphs or whatever they are called. I get quite frustrated reading interesting articles full of acronyms which aren’t expanded at least once. For the general public it makes it even harder to follow without googling. It still sounds like the work has been valuable and will be ongoing. Unlike the comment from Donald duck where effects and causes are being assumed on all levels.
Writer never cited what the acronym stands for. Bad journalism.
Dave’s Mom, Betty. There is an established link between the mRNA vaccine and myocarditis & pericarditis. The risk is slim (though higher in younger cohorts) and usually mild but it is there. Yes, the CDC, in the US, still recommends getting the vaccine but it also states that the data is still ‘evolving’. Given that we are only in the 3rd year of this disease, are learning so much about it still, that we bypassed normal testing procedures prior to administering the vaccine, and we have already seen instances where the medical community was wrong (the length of time of protection of the vaccine as well as the protection of a person’s own immunity system), it’s not unreasonable that we might eventually learn of connections between the vaccine and other health problems. To automatically dismiss that is as foolish as to automatically assume this was caused by the vaccine.