Body’s sweet move can protect heart
By Janet Raloff
From Washington, D.C., at the Experimental Biology 2004 meeting
Though heart tissue starved of oxygen in a heart attack for more than a few minutes typically begins to die, it doesn’t always succumb—especially if the tissue has recently sustained a few short bouts of oxygen deprivation. Such a situation might ensue if an artery to the area had temporarily shut down, as often occurs just before a bona fide heart attack. Something about the deprivation episodes elicits chemical changes that cause cells “to autoprotect,” explains Steven Jones of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.