Reviving A Tired Heart
With a bit of encouragement, the life-giving muscle may renew itself
By Laura Beil
A generation ago, the battle to survive a heart attack was usually won or lost in the emergency room. Medical advances have now enabled more patients to win that fight and go home from the hospital — but millions of them will face another threat in the years to come.
The heart has a monstrous appetite for fuel as it goes about pumping 2,500 gallons of blood a day. During a heart attack, when an artery feeding heart muscle gets choked off, the heart’s oxygen supply is interrupted. If starved of oxygen for too long, a portion of the heart can die, never to revive. Instead, lifeless muscle will be gradually replaced by an inflexible scar tissue not designed for pumping blood. To compensate, the remaining muscle pushes itself to work harder. Eventually, the heart can grow too stiff or too weak to efficiently eject the blood flowing into it, and a person lapses into heart failure.
Heart failure, a good portion of which is caused by heart attack, has become the leading reason older adults need hospital care. Efforts to improve treatments for heart failure have not yet led to a cure, and roughly half of patients diagnosed with the condition will not live five more years.