Transplanted hearts may change to match the biological age of the recipient, a new study suggests.
The study, posted on the preprint server bioRxiv, is not yet peer reviewed. Researchers from Boston-based Harvard University conducted heart transplants in mice and reviewed records of human heart transplant recipients at Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
In mice, the team grafted extra hearts from young mice, middle-aged mice and old mice into mice from all three age groups. After four to six months, the team took tissue samples from the hearts to look for changes linked to cellular damage of aging and compared grafted hearts to the native hearts. They found donor hearts shifted toward the recipient’s biological age. Young hearts aged faster in older mice, and old hearts appeared younger in younger mice.
Researchers then analyzed biopsy samples from 11 heart transplants from Brigham and Women’s Hospital with a large age gap, ranging from eight to 24 years for older hearts grafted into younger people, and 38 to 50 years for younger hearts into older people. They found human hearts also changed to more closely match the age of the recipient.
They then analyzed electronic health records of hundreds of heart-transplant recipients one year post-operation using measures such as heart rate, thickness of the heart’s posterior wall and exercise capacity associated with the recipient’s age rather than the donor age.
“Some, but not all, functional measures tracked the prediction that these older hearts in younger individuals functioned as if they were biologically younger, and vice versa,” lead author Jesse Poganik, who studies aging at Harvard University, told Nature. “Some things are probably simply irreversible.”
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