Heart attacks, or myocardial infarctions, remain a significant challenge in cardiology, with improving patient outcomes and predicting unfavorable courses being major areas of focus. In Germany alone, approximately 300,000 individuals experience a heart attack each year. Although treatment advancements have led to better survival rates, many patients still develop heart failure due to incomplete heart muscle recovery.
Animal studies suggest that the immune response plays a crucial role in heart muscle recovery following an infarction. However, the intricacies of the human immune response to heart attacks have yet to be fully understood.
A team of researchers from LMU University Hospital, Helmholtz Munich, and other institutions set out to address this knowledge gap by employing advanced biomedical and bioinformatics techniques to comprehensively map the human immune response to myocardial infarction. Their findings were recently published in Nature Medicine.
Heart attack patients treated at LMU University Hospital with varying clinical outcomes were selected for this study. The researchers analyzed their blood samples using multi-omic approaches, including transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics.
Dr. Kami Pekayvaz, the lead author of the study and a clinician scientist at the Department of Medicine I at LMU University Hospital, explains, “Our findings reveal that a misdirected or excessive immune response can hinder heart function recovery after an infarction.”
The team, led by Dr. Pekayvaz, Viktoria Knottenberg, PD Dr. Leo Nicolai, and Prof. Konstantin Stark from the Department of Medicine I at LMU University Hospital, and Corinna Losert and Dr. Matthias Heinig from Helmholtz Munich, identified distinct immune signatures that correlated with the clinical course of the disease. These findings could potentially pave the way for personalized care strategies to optimize heart function recovery and improve patient outcomes after a heart attack.
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1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research
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