New research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that radiation therapy can reprogram heart muscle cells to what appears to be a younger state, fixing electrical problems that cause a life-threatening arrhythmia without the need for a long-used, invasive procedure.
In that invasive procedure -- catheter ablation -- a catheter is threaded into the heart, and the tissue that triggers the life-threatening irregular heart rhythm -- ventricular tachycardia -- is burned, creating scars that block the errant signals. The new study, however, shows that noninvasive radiation therapy normally used to treat cancer can reprogram the heart muscle cells to a younger and perhaps healthier state, fixing the electrical problem in the cells themselves without needing scar tissue to block the overactive circuits. The study also suggests that the same cellular reprogramming effect could be achieved with lower doses of radiation, opening the door to the possibility of wider uses for radiation therapy in different types of cardiac arrhythmias. The study appears September 24, 2021 in the journal Nature Communications.
Physician-scientists at Washington University showed in 2017 that radiation therapy typically reserved for cancer treatment could be directed at the heart to treat ventricular tachycardia. In theory, radiation therapy could reproduce the scar tissue usually created through catheter ablation but with a much shorter and totally noninvasive procedure, making the treatment available to more severely ill patients. Surprisingly, the doctors found that patients experienced large improvements in their arrhythmias a few days to weeks after radiation therapy, much quicker than the months it can take scar tissue to form after radiation therapy, suggesting that a single dose of radiation reduces the arrhythmia without forming scar tissue. The data indicated that radiation treatment worked just as well, if not better, than catheter ablation for certain patients with ventricular tachycardia but in a different and unknown way. Read more...
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