Heart failure after a heart attack is a global epidemic leading to chronic heart failure pathology.
Heart failure after a heart attack is a global epidemic leading to chronic heart failure pathology. About 6 million people in the United States and 23 million worldwide suffer from this end-stage disease that involves dysfunction of the heart, a change that clinicians call cardiac remodeling. Despite medical advances, 2 to 17 percent of patients die within one year after a heart attack due to failure to resolve inflammation. More than 50 percent die within five years.
Ganesh Halade, Ph.D., is seeking ways to delay or reverse this heart failure, which comes from non-resolved chronic inflammation. Over-activated leukocytes from the spleen that rushed into the heart muscle to remove dead tissue and start repairs are not adequately calmed and do not receive a “get out” signal.
So, learning the details of metabolic signaling that controls the immune responses — both during the acute inflammation after injury and the resolution thereafter — is important. Halade, a University of Alabama at Birmingham associate professor in the UAB Department of Medicine Division of Cardiovascular Disease, is working to discover which metabolic signatures are biomarkers for healthy physiology and which metabolic signatures are biomarkers for heart failure pathology.
This could permit the development of a prevention plan and precise, prognostic and personalized measures to delay heart failure.
Read more at University of Alabama at Birmingham
Image: This is Ganesh Halade. (Credit: UAB)
