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April 10, 2006
How to Recover Faster from Heart Surgery
CoQ10 produces impressive results during recovery from heart surgery. A series of fascinating Australian studies demonstrate that CoQ10 may create youthful performance in older hearts. In the first study, researchers placed hearts taken from old and young rats in a device to keep them beating artificially. The researchers then raced the hearts under excessive stress. The extreme stress accelerated the heart rate to more than 500 beats per minute for two hours. At the end of the test, the young hearts recovered 45 percent of their initial function, while the old hearts recovered only 17 percent of their function.
During the second phase, one group of rats received CoQ10 for six weeks, while the other group had a placebo. Researchers then sacrificed the rats and duplicated the heartbeat marathon. The young rat hearts performed the same, whether they had received CoQ10 earlier or not. The old hearts that had received the CoQ10, on the other hand, recovered at the same rate as the young hearts. In other words, the hearts of old rats that received CoQ10 performed just as well as the hearts of young rats.
How does this discovery apply to human hearts? We know that elders do not generally tolerate heart surgery well. That option is often closed to people over 70. We believe the problem stems from “reperfusion injury,” an injury that occurs during open heart surgery when the surgical team stops the heart to operate on it, then re-starts the heart when they’ve finished. The heart-lung machine continues to circulate blood to the body during the operation. During the surgery, the heart lacks oxygen and blood, just as it does during a heart attack. When the circulation is re-started, the body experiences a rush of oxygen that causes extreme free radical damage to heart tissue. Free radicals are unstable cells that tend to “steal” electrons from neighboring cells. We know that CoQ10 helps neutralize these free radicals. Could it prevent damage to the heart caused by stopping and starting the heart during open heart surgery?
To test the theory, cardiologists bathed heart tissue in a solution that provided it with oxygen and glucose. Next, they ran an electric current through the solution to cause the heart tissue to “beat.” Researchers then measured the strength of the heart muscle contractions. They then deprived the heart tissue of oxygen and glucose for an hour to simulate the experience of open heart surgery, then they restored the oxygen and glucose, causing the release of free radicals. In this situation, the younger heart muscles recovered 70 percent of their strength while the older heart muscles regained just 49 percent of their strength.
To test the impact of CoQ10 on the heart, the researchers administered CoQ10 to the heart tissue for 30 minutes before repeating the oxygen- and glucose-deprivation experiment. As in the rat heart experiment, the old hearts showed marked improvement. In fact, old heart tissue pre-treated with CoQ10 actually recovered an astounding 72 percent of its contraction strength, slightly better than the recovery rate of the young hearts.
In these experiments, CoQ10 helps old heart recover as well as young hearts do, but don’t think that CoQ10 is effective only in older hearts. Research suggests it has other benefits to young and old hearts alike. CoQ10 can help prevent free radicals from damaging the heart in the first place. Other studies have shown that CoQ10 can lower oxidation of cholesterol and incidence of heart attacks.
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Posted by james at April 10, 2006 10:34 AM