Sunday 3 June 2012

physiology - Why is the human body able to repair a broken bone and not a heart muscle?

The heart does have stem cells in it, and there is cell turnover in the heart, of about 1% per year. Which is much slower than your skin, but not nothing. This allows your heart to grow during your life, and remodel itself slightly to become stronger/more efficient when you get in shape.



The heart can repair itself, when damaged it doesn't simply stay damaged. Unfortunately, the 'repair' leaves particularly useless scar tissue. After a heart attack, the dead muscle does repair itself, but very poorly. This 'scar' barely contracts, and isn't as strong as the heart wall around it.



This is mostly a function of the very specialized heart myocytes, and the evolutionary (relative) uselessness of being able to regenerate your heart after injury. In the wild, if your heart was injured, you were probably dead.

No comments:

Post a Comment