Syracuse (WSYR-TV) - Coronary heart disease is narrowing of the blood vessels that supply blood and oxygen to the heart.
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that in some cases surgery can reverse the already existing damage to heart muscle.
Researchers at Duke University used MRI scans to study 1,055 heart disease patients. About one fifth showed thinning of the heart wall muscle.
And, among those patients with little or no scarring of the thinned heart muscle, surgeons located the major blood vessel supplying the region of the heart that was thinned.
Then, they improved blood flow with a common procedure called re-vascularization.
The surgery got the patients’ hearts pumping more efficiently, and the thinning of the heart wall reversed itself.
