Editor's Summary

22 March 2007

Heading off heart failure

Cardiac enlargement, or hypertrophy, is a physiological response to increased workload and helps to maintain cardiac function. If the condition is prolonged, however, it can develop into heart failure. New insight into how that transition occurs has been obtained in a study of a mouse model of cardiac hypertrophy. As the animal's heart enlarges, new blood vessels develop to support it. But after about two weeks, the tumour suppressor protein p53 accumulates in heart cells, angiogenesis is blocked and the mice suffer cardiac failure. Targeting this process by inhibiting p53 or by promoting angiogenesis may be a means of preventing the transition from cardiac hypertrophy to heart failure.

Letter: p53-induced inhibition of Hif-1 causes cardiac dysfunction during pressure overload

Masanori Sano, Tohru Minamino, Haruhiro Toko, Hideyuki Miyauchi, Masayuki Orimo, Yingjie Qin, Hiroshi Akazawa, Kaoru Tateno, Yosuke Kayama, Mutsuo Harada, Ippei Shimizu, Takayuki Asahara, Hirofumi Hamada, Shuhei Tomita, Jeffrey D. Molkentin, Yunzeng Zou & Issei Komuro

doi:10.1038/nature05602

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