Cardiology

Restoring heart elasticity in a heart failure model

Patients with heart failure often have shortness of breath and become fatigued quickly. They frequently suffer from water retention, heart palpitations, and dizziness. The condition can be triggered by a combination of elevated ...

Genetics

Pathomechanisms in heart disease discovered

Titin is a "titanically large" protein—the largest in the human body—which enables elastic movements of our muscles, including the heart. Mutations in the titin gene (TTN) that impair this function are the most frequent ...

Cardiology

New study illuminates the biology of a common heart disorder

Researchers at Penn Medicine have made a major advance in understanding the biology of a common, puzzling, and often fatal heart disorder, dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), which features the enlargement of the heart and a progressive ...

Cardiology

Newly discovered mechanism regulates myocardial distensibility

A healthy heart beats 50 to 100 times a minute and pumps 8,000 liters of blood around our body every day. A precondition for this function is the elasticity of the cardiac walls, which dilate as blood flows in (diastole) ...

Cardiology

Protein dynamics in the beating heart

The protein titin is a large structural component of the sarcomere—the machinery that mediates contraction of cardiac muscle cells. Despite its importance to the beating heart, little is known about titin turnover.

Medical research

Tracking titin in real time

Using new high-resolution imaging techniques, MDC researchers and colleagues have tracked titin, the body's largest protein, in real time throughout its entire lifecycle. The method and results could provide new insight into ...

page 1 from 2