Newswise – COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers used mice to develop a mathematical model of a myocardial infarction, popularly known as a heart attack.
The new model predicts several new combinations of useful drugs that may one day help treat heart attacks, according to researchers at Ohio State University.
Typically caused by obstructions in the coronary arteries, or vessels that supply blood to the heart, these cardiovascular events are experienced by more than 800,000 Americans each year, and about 30% end up dying from it. But even for survivors, the damage that these attacks inflict on the heart muscles is permanent and can cause dangerous inflammation in the affected areas of the heart.
Treatment to restore blood flow to these blocked heart steps often includes surgery and drugs, or what is known as reperfusion therapy. Nicolae Moise, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in biomedical engineering in the state of Ohio, said the study uses mathematical algorithms to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs used to fight the potentially lethal inflammation that many patients experience. after an attack.
“Biology and medicine are starting to get more mathematical,” Moise said. “There is so much data that you need to start integrating it into some kind of framework.” Although Moise has worked on other mathematical models of animal hearts, he said the detailed framework in the current paper is the most detailed scheme of myocardial infarction in mice ever made.
The research is published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
Represented by a series of differential equations, the model created by Moise’s team was made using data from previous animal studies. In medicine, differential equations are often used to control the growth of diseases in the form of graphs.
But this study chose to model how certain immune cells such as myocytes, neutrophils and macrophages, cells essential for fighting infection and fighting necrosis (toxic damage to the heart), react to four different immunomodulatory drugs during a period of one month. These drugs are designed to suppress the immune system so that it does not cause as much harmful inflammation to the parts of the heart that were damaged.
This research focused on the effectiveness of the drugs one hour after the treatment of the mice.
Their findings showed that certain combinations of these drug inhibitors were more effective at reducing inflammation than others. “In medicine, math and equations can be used to describe these systems,” Moise said. “Just look at it, and you’ll find rules and a consistent story between them.
“With the therapies we are researching in our model, we can improve patient outcomes, even with the best medical care available,” he said.
Depending on their previous health, a person may take six to eight months to recover from a heart attack. The quality of care patients receive in these first few weeks could set the tone for how long their path to recovery will be.
Because the Moses simulation is purely theoretical, it will not lead to improved therapies soon. More accurate mouse data is needed before his work can become an asset to other scientists, but Moise said he envisions the model as a potential tool in the fight against the ravages of heart disease.
“It will be a few years before we can integrate that kind of approach into real clinical work,” Moise said. “But what we’re doing is the first step toward that.”
The co-author of the study was Avner Friedman, a professor of mathematics in the state of Ohio. This research was supported by the Ohio State Institute of Mathematical Biosciences and the National Science Foundation.
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