Editor's Choice Main Category: Heart Disease Also Included In: Stem Cell Research Article Date: 09 Jun 2012 - 2:00 PDT

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The research is profound because it contradicts much of the generally accepted theories of what causes arterial hardening, and the concept may also relate to many other diseases could the associated stem cells be pinpointed.

What senior author Song Li, a bioengineering professor at UC Berkeley and a researcher at the Berkeley Stem Cell Center, and his team have uncovered is a dormant stem cell in blood vessel walls, that seems to sit inactive for most of a person's lifetime, before coming to life and causing less functional cells to begin to grow. Li says these new types of cells that start growing in later life, are the root cause of arterial hardening and clogging that are associated with deadly strokes and heart attacks.

Originally, it was thought that the smooth muscle cells in the arteries lining become scarred over time, and this leads to the narrow and brittle arteries that play a major part in causing cardiovascular disease. Not so says Liu: Essentially, what the scientists are saying is that the smooth muscle cells are not to blame. Rather a different kind of stem cell, that Li calls multipotent vascular stem cells, kicks in, and begins growing cells that look much like the smooth muscle cells, but don't function correctly. The cells were not found previously, because there are so few of them, that they were hard to isolate.

Li continues:

It almost sounds like something from Blade Runner, where the replicant humans have been deliberately designed to deteriorate and die at a much faster rate than the natural ones. What purpose would it serve the body under standard evolutionary terms to have cells activating later in life that effectively lead to its demise? With the arteries poorly formed, with wrong cell types, the blood flow becomes slowed and can then stopped completely. This causes strokes or heart attacks, depending on the location of the blockage. Strokes and heart attacks are one of the leading causes of death in the United States.

Creating drugs or other genetic treatments to shut down these stem cells or even deactivate them while a person is still young has the potential in the future to prevent arteriole hardening, reverse the damage already done, and even make this type of cardiovascular disease a thing of the past. Perhaps the futuristic Woody Allen movie "Sleeper" where people smoke tobacco and eat a high fat diet because it's healthier is not so far fetched after all.

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Scientists Discover A Stem Cell That Causes Heart Disease