Evidence for Cardiomyocyte Renewal in Humans
Abstract
It has been difficult to establish whether we are limited to the heart muscle cells we are born with or if cardiomyocytes are generated also later in life. We have taken advantage of the integration of carbon-14, generated by nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War, into DNA to establish the age of cardiomyocytes in humans. We report that cardiomyocytes renew, with a gradual decrease from 1% turning over annually at the age of 25 to 0.45% at the age of 75. Fewer than 50% of cardiomyocytes are exchanged during a normal life span. The capacity to generate cardiomyocytes in the adult human heart suggests that it may be rational to work toward the development of therapeutic strategies aimed at stimulating this process in cardiac pathologies.
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We thank R. Lee, K. Spalding, and members of the Frisén lab for valuable discussions; M. Toro and K. Hamrin for help with flow cytometry; P. Reimer for assistance with radiocarbon interpretation; R. Cassidy, M. Müller, and E. Klaile for technical advice; M. Stahlberg and T. Bergman for help with high-performance liquid chromatography; and D. Kurdyla and P. Zermeno for producing graphite. This study was supported by grants from the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation, the Swedish Research Council, Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse, Human Frontiers Science Program, the Swedish Cancer Society, the Foundation for Strategic Research, the Karolinska Institutet, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, NIH/NCRR (RR13461), European Commission FP7 CardioCell, and the Tobias Foundation. This work was performed in part under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. R.D.B. and F.B.-H. were supported by fellowships from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and F.B.-H. was also supported by a fellowship from the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation.
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Science
Volume 324 | Issue 5923
3 April 2009
3 April 2009
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American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Received: 14 August 2008
Accepted: 29 January 2009
Published in print: 3 April 2009
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