Mining fat tissue for cardiac repair

Stem cells from abdomen may boost recovery after the big one

CHICAGO — Sifting stem cells from fatty tissue and shooting these nascent cells into the coronary arteries of people who just survived a heart attack may limit heart-tissue damage, researchers have found. The process, which takes a few hours, might rescue cells on the cusp of dying, said Henricus Duckers, an interventional cardiologist at Erasmus University in the Netherlands who presented the new findings November 16 at a meeting of the American Heart Association.