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Nature Cardiovascular Research is one year old. We look back at our first year and look forward to the years to come, grateful to our authors and audience for their contribution and support.
Iron is essential to the production of myocardial energy and proteins critical for cardiovascular function. Nearly 50% of patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) meet current criteria for iron deficiency, and there has been considerable interest in intravenous repletion of iron stores as a therapeutic strategy to improve HFrEF outcomes. However, the data on intravenous iron therapy in HFrEF have been mixed.
Pregnancy is associated with a substantial risk of short-term and long-term cardiovascular diseases. Here we discuss physiological and social factors that affect the risk of pregnancy-related cardiovascular diseases and opportunities to improve outcomes.
Regulatory elements including promoters and enhancers control tissue- and context-dependent gene expression. A new study presents an atlas of transcribed regulatory elements in human heart compartments, and their changes in transcription in the failing heart.
Pioneering cohort studies including the Framingham Heart Study have led to major insights into cardiovascular disease. However, these studies are underpowered to identify the effects of less common risk factors on human health. This has motivated the development of the UK Biobank, a biomedical database linking health and genetic information in 500,000 individuals.
Using cap analysis of gene expression, we have constructed a map of the genome regulatory network (promoters and enhancers) in healthy and failing human hearts. Analysis of this map demonstrates differential transcriptional regulation in cardiac chambers, disease states, and ischemic and non-ischemic cardiomyopathies. This information could lead to tailored therapies.
Supplementation with the gut microbial-derived metabolites acetate and butyrate has been shown to lower blood pressure in experimental models of hypertension. However, the translational potential of these metabolites has been unexplored. We provide clinical evidence that acetate and butyrate lower blood pressure in untreated patients with hypertension.
Wen Tan et al. review the current technologies available for single-cell transcriptomics, epigenomics and multi-omics analyses, their impact on the cardiovascular research and possible future applications.
In a phase II, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind cross-over trial, Jama et al. show that delivery of short-chain fatty acids via acetylated and butyrylated high-amylose maize starch (HAMSAB) supplementation result in a clinically relevant reduction in 24-hour systolic blood pressure in patients with essential hypertension.
By conducting a large multi-ancestry GWAS of varicose veins followed by bioinformatics analyses, Levin et al. identified new and recurrent causal variants, traits with shared genetic mechanisms, and putative causal risk factors of the disease, revealing its polygenic architecture and genetic overlap with arterial and venous disease and identifying potential therapeutic targets.
Deviatiiarov, Gams et al. provide an atlas of the actively transcribed regulatory elements (promoters and enhancers) in the human heart by performing cap analysis of gene expression (CAGE) on 21 healthy donor hearts and ten failing hearts from ischemic and non-ischemic cardiomyopathy. The data show how the alternative use of regulatory elements modulates the differential gene expression across different heart chambers, disease states and disease types.
Berg Luecke et al. developed an analytical platform, CellSurfer, that enables the quantitative profiling of cell surface proteome (surfaceome) from small samples, and they apply it to primary human heart cells. The analyses revealed LSMEM2 as a surface protein specific for healthy cardiomyocytes; important surfaceome differences between primary human cardiac cells and the pluripotent stem cell derivatives; and differences in the abundance of surface proteins between human failing and non-failing cardiomyocytes.