skin cells to heart cells

[ed34]

I read today that skin cells have been turned into myocardial cells. This means obviously, no rejection problems. The success has been shown in rats and is a few years from human use, but it does look promising. This is obviously a brilliant treatment for heart failure, but in all cases?
If heart failure is caused by ischemia, and I think ultimately a high proportion are, then how will this help? If heart failure is occurring due to ischemia and there is no option remaining for revascularization, how will simply replacing heart muscle have any benefit? If a large area of the heart contains a lot of dead muscle due to blood flow loss, simply replacing the muscle will not have any benefit because the muscle will quickly die again. So, I am at a loss as to why scientists are showing so much excitement over this. If they could make stem cells create new arteries then I could understand it.

I would welcome any comments.

[ed34]

"due to ischemia it is not correct"
Hi, I got the info here..
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/hf/causes.html

I did read about some new techniques of forming arteries but the problem was getting them to link up to capillaries which is of course where the tissue extracts what it needs from the blood. Hopefully they've overcome this.
It is still surprising to me that CHD has been recognised for decades and yet it still isn't fully understood how and why it forms. Only the real basics are known. You would have thought with the amount of money pumped into research and the expert minds behind it, there would be a cure by now. I suppose like many things (especially cancer) it turns out to be far more complicated than originally believed.

[jrbon]

I do not know the figures but I think that your idea that the majority of HF it is due to ischemia it is not correct. In fact a few days ago that HF exist in about 2% of everyone older than 70 years.

Nevertheless, consider my case, I have a very large portion of my heart death because I delayed too long to look for assistance while my heart attack. However, after proper stenting,  the nuclear test shows good perfusion. I guess that in such cases it could work.

By the way, I read a couple of months ago that they also have grown arterial vessels... so it should be just a matter of placing them together.

Jesus.