Regeneration Research: A Personal Matter Of The Heart

..."The dogma that the heart cannot generate new muscle cells has been challenged since 1987 by a somewhat lonely skeptic, Dr. Piero Anversa, now of the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Anversa maintains that heart muscle cells are renewed so fast that a person dying at age 80 has replaced the heart four times over. Many other researchers have doubted this assertion.

Cell turnover rates can easily be measured in animals by making their cells radioactive and seeing how fast they are replaced. Such an experiment, called pulse-labeling, could not ethically be done in people. But Dr. Frisen realized several years ago that nuclear weapons tested in the atmosphere until 1963 had in fact labeled the cells of the entire world’s population.

The nuclear blasts generated a radioactive form of carbon, known as carbon-14. The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has gradually diminished since 1963, when above-ground tests were banned, as it gets incorporated into plants and animals or diffuses into the oceans." ...

Nicholas Wade "Heart Muscle Renewed Over Lifetime, Study Finds" New York Times April 2, 2009

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Monday 1/31/2005 8:08 PM PDT

Hi Cogito:

Once again, sorry that you had to cut short your visit by one day. Fares must change often!!

B & I just returned from our Dr. Chat....appointment. Both of us are O.K. He told us to stay the course. I no longer, in theory, have Congestive Heart Failure, in the sense that my condition has stabilized with no further degradation. Great news!!!

Our best to N. See you both soon.

Love... Dad

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University of California, San Francisco Medical Center

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