The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart - Softcover

Harding, Sian E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262548410 ISBN 13: 9780262548410

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2024

Synopsis

How science is opening up the mysteries of the heart, revealing the poetry in motion within the machine.

Your heart is a miracle in motion, a marvel of construction unsurpassed by any human-made creation. It beats 100,000 times every day—if you were to live to 100, that would be more than 3 billion beats across your lifespan. Despite decades of effort in labs all over the world, we have not yet been able to replicate the heart’s perfect engineering. But, as Sian Harding shows us in The Exquisite Machine, new scientific developments are opening up the mysteries of the heart. And this explosion of new science—ultrafast imaging, gene editing, stem cells, artificial intelligence, and advanced sub-light microscopy—has crucial, real-world consequences for health and well-being.
 
Harding—a world leader in cardiac research—explores the relation between the emotions and heart function, reporting that the heart not only responds to our emotions, it creates them as well. The condition known as Broken Heart Syndrome, for example, is a real disorder than can follow bereavement or stress. The Exquisite Machine describes the evolutionary forces that have shaped the heart’s response to damage, the astonishing rejuvenating power of stem cells, how we can avoid heart disease, and why it can be so hard to repair a damaged heart. It tells the stories of patients who have had the devastating experiences of a heart attack, chaotic heart rhythms, or stress-induced acute heart failure. And it describes how cutting-edge technologies are enabling experiments and clinical trials that will lead us to new solutions to the worldwide scourge of heart disease.

About this title

About the Author

Sian E. Harding, a recognized authority in cardiac science, is Emeritus Professor of Cardiac Pharmacology in the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, where she led the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences and the BHF Centre for Cardiac Regeneration.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

EXTREME ATHLETES—TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING?
Exercise is good for you, there is no doubt about it. But we humans are always taking things to extremes, and there is a point where even exercise can turn bad. Endurance athletes are a breed apart, performing feats of astonishing strength and stamina. The record at the time of writing is 59 successive days running a marathon, but no doubt this has been broken since. Interestingly, endurance cycling is one of the toughest sports for your heart, probably because of the combination of large leg muscles needing steady maximum blood flow and the intermittent peaks of intense work for the arms and upper body. Top blood pressures of 200 mgHg are common during rapid mountain climbs as in the Tour de France. The cyclists must also keep this up for long periods—up to five hours— compared to the two to three hours for a marathon.
Overall, endurance cyclists do well in general health, with mortality reduced by 41 percent and life extended by 17 percent.6 But a significant proportion do develop heart abnormalities, about 50 percent more than in the general population. These include a wide range of arrhythmia types including atrial fibrillation. A thick (or hypertrophied) heart wall is much more prone to rhythm abnormalities. When 46 athletes (37 cyclists) who had these abnormalities were followed up over five years in one study, 18 had a serious cardiac event. Nine of them (all cyclists) died within two years. We must always remember that evolution balances the increased risk of overstimulating the heart with the benefits for immediate survival in times of danger. Extreme exercise saves lives in an emergency but is risky as a modern lifestyle choice!

Chapter 5
6. D. W. T. Wundersitz, B. A. Gordon, C. J. Lavie, V. Nadurata, and M. I. C. Kingsley, “Impact of Endurance Exercise on the Heart of Cyclists: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases 63 (2020): 750–761.

Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262548410
• ISBN 13: 9780262548410
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232