Electric mesh helps to improve functionality of damaged hearts

The team was led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Seoul National University and their work, published in Science Translational Medicine, is said to point to a potential new way of improving heart function and arrhythmias by compensating for damaged cardiac muscle and enabling living heart muscle to work more efficiently.

Under normal conditions, the heart pumps blood throughout the body through a series of coordinated contractions maintained by an electrical conduction system. With the development of heart failure - when weakened heart muscle damages the heart's pumping mechanism - this electrical conduction system can also be damaged.

"Some patients with heart failure are treated with resynchronization therapy, in which three small electrodes are implanted through a pacemaker to keep the heart contracting co-ordinately," said corresponding author Hye Jin Hwang, MD, PhD, a researcher in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine in BIDMC's CardioVascular Institute. "But pacemakers deliver electrical stimulation only at specific places in the heart and do not provide comprehensive coverage of the entire organ, as the heart's own cardiac electrical conduction system does."