“Cardiac amyloidosis, a common and deadly cause of heart failure, is now treatable thanks to recent drug breakthroughs,” reports The Doomslayer.
The New York Times explains:
Over the past 50 years, heart failure has become one of the fastest-growing cardiac killers. It was long considered a disease of aging, caused by gradual yet unavoidable changes to the heart. But doctors are now discovering that about 15 percent of cases are caused by a rogue protein called amyloid, perhaps best known for its role in Alzheimer’s. While one type tangles neurons in the brain, others infiltrate the heart, making the muscle stiff and less able to pump blood.
Until recently, cardiac amyloidosis was a death sentence, but new medications, including two approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the past year, have made this disease increasingly manageable…Early signs include carpal tunnel syndrome, a narrowing of the spine and a rupture of the biceps tendon, as amyloid plaques accumulate across the body….Ozzie Giglio, who learned he had cardiac amyloidosis in 2016, recalled his doctor saying, “I want to get you on the heart transplant list right away. That’s the only way to save your life.”….
Instead of needing to biopsy the heart, doctors can now use a scan that lights up amyloid plaques, and test patients’ blood and urine for the abnormal protein….
What makes cardiac amyloidosis so deadly is that the abnormal protein gets between the fibers of the heart, stiffening the muscle and impairing the heart’s rhythm…Some forms are hereditary; others occur spontaneously for reasons experts don’t yet understand.
There are two types of misfolded proteins that usually cause cardiac amyloidosis, but the new drugs target only one of them, transthyretin, either silencing its production or stabilizing the molecule so that it doesn’t infiltrate the heart….these new drugs [such as vutrisiran] reduced deaths by 25 to 35 percent…In the most recent trial, patients on vutrisiran lived nearly as long as the general population.
Artificial intelligence recently created new antibiotics that killed drug-resistant gonorrhea and MRSA.
Artificial intelligence is also being used to generate highly-effective antibodies to fight disease.
Scientists are using artificial intelligence to identify the trillions of viruses that live within human beings.
A virus is being used to cure deafness in new gene therapy. Researchers also discovered that a plant virus could be used to save crops from root-eating pests.
