Journal
SCIENCE
Volume 324, Issue 5923, Pages 98-102Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.1164680
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Funding
- Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation
- Swedish Research Council
- Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse
- Human Frontiers Science Program
- Swedish Cancer Society
- Foundation for Strategic Research
- Karolinska Institutet
- Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation
- NIH/NCRR [RR13461]
- European Commission
- Tobias Foundation
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [DE-AC52-07NA27344]
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research fellowships
- Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation fellowship
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It has been difficult to establish whether we are limited to the heart muscle cells we are born with or if cardiomyocytes are generated also later in life. We have taken advantage of the integration of carbon-14, generated by nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War, into DNA to establish the age of cardiomyocytes in humans. We report that cardiomyocytes renew, with a gradual decrease from 1% turning over annually at the age of 25 to 0.45% at the age of 75. Fewer than 50% of cardiomyocytes are exchanged during a normal life span. The capacity to generate cardiomyocytes in the adult human heart suggests that it may be rational to work toward the development of therapeutic strategies aimed at stimulating this process in cardiac pathologies.
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