Mapping shear stress in coronary arteries can help predict heart attacks

A heart attack is like an earthquake. When a patient is having a heart attack, it’s easy for cardiologists to look at a coronary artery and identify the blockages that are causing trouble. However, predicting exactly where and when a seismic fault will rupture in the future is a scientific challenge – in both geology and cardiology.

In a recent paper in Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Habib Samady, MD, and colleagues at Emory and Georgia Tech show that the goal is achievable, in principle. Calculating and mapping how hard the blood’s flow is tugging on the coronary artery wall – known as “wall shear stress” – could allow cardiologists to predict heart attacks, the results show.

Map of wall shear stress (WSS) in a coronary artery from someone who had a heart attack

“We’ve made a lot of progress on defining and identifying ‘vulnerable plaque’,” says Samady, director of interventional cardiology/cardiac catheterization at Emory University Hospital. “The techniques we’re using are now fast enough that they could help guide clinical decision-making.”

Here’s where the analogy to geography comes in. By vulnerable plaque, Samady means a spot in a coronary artery that is likely to burst and cause a clot nearby, obstructing blood flow. The researchers’ approach, based on fluid dynamics, involves seeing a coronary artery like a meandering river, in which sediment (atherosclerotic plaque) builds up in some places and erodes in others. Samady says it has become possible to condense complicated fluid dynamics calculations, so that what once took months now might take a half hour.

Previous research from Emory showed that high levels of wall shear stress correlate with changes in the physical/imaging characteristics of the plaque over time. It gave hints where bad things might happen, in patients with relatively mild heart disease. In contrast, the current results show that where bad things actually did happen, the shear stress was significantly higher.

“This is the most clinically relevant work we have done,” says Parham Eshtehardi, MD, a cardiovascular research fellow, looking back on the team’s previous research, published in Circulation in 2011. Read more

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment

Mini-monsters of cardiac regeneration

After a heart attack, cardiac muscle cells die because they are deprived of blood and oxygen. In an adult human, those cells represent a dead end. They can’t change their minds about what kind of cell they’ve become.

In newborn babies, as well as in adult fish, the heart can regenerate after injury. Why can’t the human heart be more fishy? At Emory, researcher Jinhu Wang is seeking answers, which could guide the development of regenerative therapies.

“If we want to understand cardiac regeneration in mammals, we can look at it from the viewpoint of the fish,” he says.

A lot of research in regenerative medicine focuses on the potential of stem cells, which have not committed to become one type of tissue, such as brain, skin or muscle. Wang stresses that the ability of zebrafish hearts to regenerate does not originate from stem cells. It comes from the regular tissues. The cells are induced to go back in time and multiply, although their capacity to regenerate may vary with the age of the animal, he says.

Jinhu Wang, PhD manages an impressive set of fish tanks

Zebrafish hearts are simpler than mammals’: theirs have just two chambers, while ours have four. Nobel Prize winner Christiane Nusslein-Vollhard has promoted the use of zebrafish as a genetic model in developmental biology. Its embryos are transparent, making it easy to spot abnormalities.

Wang’s fish room in the basement of Emory’s Rollins Research Center contains more than 1000 fish tanks, with different sizes of cage for various ages and an elaborate water recycling system. The adult fish eat brine shrimp that are stored in vats in one corner of the lab. Read more

Posted on September 5, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Heart 1 Comment

Racial disparities in a CV biomarker

Because circulating progenitor cells repair blood vessels, they are a measure of regenerative capacity in the cardiovascular system. Cardiologist Arshed Quyyumi, MD and his colleagues at Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute have intensively studied this cell type as a marker of vulnerability or resilience.

A recent paper from Quyyumi’s team in Circulation Research examines circulating progenitor cells (CPCs) through the lens of racial disparity. The authors find that African-Americans tend to have lower levels of this regenerative biomarker:

In a large well-characterized biracial cohort, we demonstrate that black participants had significantly lower CPC counts compared with whites, even after adjustment for differences in demographic factors and CVD risk factors. These results were validated in an independent cohort. Thus, on average, after adjustment for sex and other CVD risk factors, blacks have CPC levels that are ≈15% to 30% lower compared with whites, even in subjects free of risk factors. CPC levels decline with age, reaching on average half the levels at age 80 compared with age 20. We found that blacks have CPC counts equivalent to those in whites who are 14 years older. CPC levels are higher after AMI as a result of mobilization because of injury. We show for first time that blacks have 30% to 35% lower CPC mobilization in the setting of AMI.

This is a tricky area to study. How many socioeconomic and environmental factors go into the racial disparities of cardiovascular disease risk? Diet. Exercise. Geography, education, access to healthcare. Air pollution. Psychological stress and inflammation associated with discrimination. It is possible to view CPCs as summing up many of these influences, analogous to the way hemoglobin A1C measurements integrate someone’s blood sugar levels over time as a marker of diabetes. Read more

Posted on August 29, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment

Stem cells driven into selective suicide

The term “stem cell” is increasingly stretchy. Orthopedic specialists have been using it when referring to bone marrow concentrate or platelet rich plasma, which are marketed as treatments for joint pain. At Lab Land, we have an interest in pluripotent stem cells, which can differentiate into many types of tissues.

For many applications, the stem cells are actually impurities that need to be removed, because pluripotent stem cells are capable of becoming teratomas, a type of tumor. For quality control, researchers want to figure out how to ensure that the stem-cell-derived cardiac muscle or neural progenitor or pancreas cells (or whatever) are as pure as possible.

Cardiologist and stem cell expert Chunhui Xu has been continuing a line of investigation on this topic. In a recent paper in ACS Chemical Biology, her team showed that “suicide-inducing molecules” can eliminate undifferentiated stem cells from a mixture of cells. This stem-cell-derived mixture was mostly cardiac muscle cells or their progenitors, which Xu’s team wants to use for therapeutic purposes.

Other labs have used metabolic selection – depriving cells of glucose and giving them only lactate –as a selective method for eliminating stem cells from cardiac muscle cultures. This paper shows that the “selective suicide” method works for early-stage differentiation cultures, containing cardiac progenitors, while the metabolic method works only for late-stage cultures contains beating cardiomyocytes.

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment

Blue plate special: express delivery to the heart

The anti-arrhythmia drug amiodarone is often prescribed for control of atrial fibrillation, but can have toxic effects upon the lungs, eyes, thyroid and liver. Emory and Georgia Tech scientists have developed a method for delivering amiodarone directly to the heart in an extended release gel to reduce off-target effects.

The results were published in Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology.

The senior author is Rebecca Levit, MD, assistant professor of medicine (cardiology) at Emory University School of Medicine and adjunct in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. Graduate student Jose Garcia – part of co-author Andres Garcia’s lab at Georgia Tech — and Peter Campbell, MD are the first authors.

An amiodarone-containing gel was applied to the outside of the heart by a minimally invasive procedure. After a one-time delivery, the gel could reduce the duration of atrial fibrillation and the likelihood of its development for a month in a pig model. The researchers were also able to show that amiodarone did not have toxic effects on the pigs’ lungs.

As noted in the book Off-label prescribing – Justifying unapproved medicine, amiodarone is “one of the very few drugs approved by the FDA in modern times without rigorous randomized clinical trials.” Read more

Posted on May 15, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment

For nanomedicine, cell sex matters

The biological differences between male and female cells may influence their uptake of nanoparticles, which have been much discussed as specific delivery vehicles for medicines.

Biomedical engineer Vahid Serpooshan, PhD

New Emory/Georgia Tech BME faculty member Vahid Serpooshan has a recent paper published in ACS Nano making this point. He and his colleagues from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Stanford/McGill/UC Berkeley tested amniotic stem cells, derived from placental tissue. They found that female amniotic cells had significantly higher uptake of nanoparticles (quantum dots) than male cells. The effect of cell sex on nanoparticle uptake was reversed in fibroblasts. The researchers also found out that female versus male amniotic stem cells exhibited different responses to reprogramming into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).

Female human amniotic stem cells with nanoparticles .Green: quantum dots/ nanoparticles; red: cell staining; blue: nuclei.

“We believe this is a substantial discovery and a game changer in the field of nanomedicine, in taking safer and more effective and accurate steps towards successful clinical applications,” says Serpooshan, who is part of the Department of Pediatrics and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.

Serpooshan’s interests lie in the realm of pediatric cardiology. His K99 grant indicates that he is planning to develop techniques for recruiting and activating cardiomyoblasts, via “a bioengineered cardiac patch delivery of small molecules.” Here at Emory, he joins labs with overlapping interests such as those of Mike Davis, Hee Cheol Cho and Nawazish Naqvi. Welcome!

Posted on March 22, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment

Elevated (but still low) troponin as a long term cardio biomarker

This weekend (March 10) at the American College of Cardiology meeting, data will emerge on whether expensive and much-discussed PCSK9 inhibitors can lower the risk of heart disease as much as they reduce LDL cholesterol.

To help doctors decide who should take cholesterol-lowering drugs that cost thousands of dollars a year, the focus of discussion could fall on risk models, such as the Framingham score and its successors, or other biomarkers besides various forms of cholesterol. What a coincidence! We have experts on those topics at Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute: ECCRI co-director Arshed Quyyumi, MD and Laurence Sperling, MD, Director of Preventive Cardiology at the Emory Clinic.

Cardiologists led by Quyyumi have a recent paper in Journal of the American Heart Association looking at troponin as a long-term cardiovascular disease biomarker. Troponin is familiar to cardiologists because it is a sign of acute damage to the heart muscle. If someone with chest pain goes to the emergency department of a hospital, a test for troponin in the blood can say whether a heart attack occurred.

However, as clinical tests for troponin have become more sensitive in the last decade, interpretation has moved past just a “yes/no” question. The levels of troponin now detectable are much smaller than those used to confirm a heart attack. Elevated troponin can be detected in all sorts of situations where the heart is under stress, including after strenuous exercise in healthy individuals. The “optimal cutoff” the Emory authors use in some of their statistical analyses is 5.2 picograms per milliliter. This graph, derived from a 2011 Circulation paper, illustrates just how low that is. Read more

Posted on March 6, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment

When circulating ambulances disappear

Someone driving around a city on a regular basis will see ambulances. At times they’re going somewhere fast; sometimes they’re just driving. What if, on a given day, fewer ambulances are visible?

One possible conclusion might be: the ambulances are away responding to a group of people who need help. This effect resembles what Arshed Quyyumi and colleagues from Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute observed in a recent paper, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Arshed Quyyumi, MD

Quyyumi’s team looked at progenitor cells, which circulate in the blood and are attracted to sites of injury. In a group of 356 patients with stable coronary artery disease, the researchers saw that some (31 percent) had “ExMI” – exercise-mediated myocardial ischemia. That means impairments in blood flow were visible via cardiac imaging under the stress of exercise. This is a relatively mild impairment; participants did not report chest pain. This paper emerges from the MIPS (Mental Stress Ischemia Prognosis) study, 2011-2014.

The ambulance-progenitor cell analogy isn’t perfect; exercise, generally a good thing, increases progenitor cell levels in the blood, says co-first author and cardiology fellow Muhammad Hammadah. The study supports the idea that patients with coronary artery disease may benefit from cardiac rehab programs, which drive the progenitor cells into the ischemic tissue, so they can contribute into vascular repair and regeneration. Read more

Posted on February 27, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Heart 1 Comment

Calming an electrical storm in the heart

AT = anterior tubercle of C6, C = carotid artery, LC = longus colli muscle, T = thyroid gland, IJ = internal jugular vein, compressed

The most recent issue of Emory Medicine features a story that first came to Lab Land’s attention when it was presented as an abstract at the 2017 American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions meeting.

Emory doctors were challenged by a patient who repeatedly developed cardiac arrhythmias, called “refractory electrical storm.” They used a local anesthesia procedure called stellate ganglion block — normally used for complex pain — to calm the storm. Cardiac electrophysiologist Michael Lloyd, who likes solving puzzles, was the one who decided to try it.

Emory anesthesiologist Boris Spektor provided this ultrasound picture of the procedure. Stellate ganglion block is also being tested for conditions such as PTSD. Please read the whole story!

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment

#AHA17 highlight: cardiac pacemaker cells

At the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions meeting this week, Hee Cheol Cho’s lab is presenting three abstracts on pacemaker cells. These cells make up the sinoatrial node, which generates electrical impulses driving our heart beats. Knowing how to engineer them could enhance cardiologists’ ability to treat arrhythmias, especially in pediatric patients, but that goal is still some distance away.

Just a glimpse of the challenge comes from graduate student Sandra Grijalva’s late breaking oral abstract describing “Induced Pacemaker Spheroids as a Model to Reverse-Engineer the Native Sinoatrial Node”, which was presented yesterday.

Cho has previously published how induced pacemaker cells can be created by introducing the TBX18 gene into rat cardiac muscle cells. In the new research, when a spheroid of induced pacemaker cells was surrounded by a layer of cardiac muscle cells, the IPM cells were able to drive the previously quiescent nearby cells at around 145 beats per minute. [For reference, rats’ hearts beat in living animals at around 300 beats per minute.] Read more

Posted on November 14, 2017 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment

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