Discover the intriguing similarities and differences in the heart’s structure between pigs and humans, and what this means for cardiology research and medical advancements.
– by The Don
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Trabeculations of the porcine and human cardiac ventricles are different in number but similar in total volume.
Jensen et al., Clin Anat 2024
DOI: 10.1002/ca.24135
Listen, folks, we’ve got something incredible to talk about here – it’s about the heart, and it’s amazing. You know the heart, right? It’s got these things called trabeculations, very important, very complex. Now, we’ve been looking at pig hearts – yes, pigs – because they might be big in xenotransplantation, that’s transplanting animal organs to humans, a huge deal.
We thought, maybe pigs have fewer trabeculations than humans, and we checked – we checked bigly. We looked at 16 pig hearts, and you know what we found? They’ve got few large trabeculations, but when you look closer, there are hundreds of tiny ones hiding in there. But still, not as many as in humans, not even close.
Then we did something really smart – we used high-resolution MRI, the best, to compare more pig hearts to human hearts. And guess what? The left ventricles, pretty much the same in trabeculations. The right ones, pigs have a bit less, but it’s close, very close.
And we didn’t stop there – we looked at pig embryos, from day 14 to 35, and everything was growing, the trabeculations, the compact layer, all of it. But it’s not just about compaction, no. It’s about growth rates, different growth rates. That’s the key.
So, to wrap it up, the story here is that the trabecular morphology, the way it looks, it’s not all about compaction. It’s about growth, it’s about proportions, and it’s totally different from what we thought. And that’s something to remember – it’s huge.