Washington: When a beating heart slips into an irregular, life-threatening rhythm, delivering a burst of electric current from a pacemaker or defibrillator is the treatment most commonly known.
But because the electricity itself can cause pain, tissue damage and other serious side-effects, a Johns Hopkins-led research team wants to replace these jolts with a kinder, gentler remedy: light.
Five biomedical engineers from Johns Hopkins and Stony Brook universities described their plan to use biological lab data and an intricate computer model to devise a better way to heal ailing hearts.
Other scientists are already using light-sensitive cells to control certain activities in the brain.
The Johns Hopkins-Stony Brook researchers said that they plan to give this technique a cardiac twist so that doctors in the near future will be able to use low-energy light to solve serious heart problems such as arrhythmia .
"Applying electricity to the heart has its drawbacks," the project`s supervisor, Natalia Trayanova, the Murray B. Sachs Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins, said.
"When we use a defibrillator, it`s like blasting open a door because we don`t have the key. It applies too much force and too little finesse. We want to control this treatment in a more intelligent way. We think it`s possible to use light to reshape the behavior of the heart without blasting it," she said.
The research is published online in the journal Nature Communications.
ANI