WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CARDIAC REMODELING



A. Martin Gerdes, Ph.D., New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine, Old Westbury, NY, USA

The "Age of Cardiac Remodeling" began in the mid-1990s with the realization that drugs leading to improved ventricular remodeling were doing something remarkable in cardiac patients. This created an experimental need for high quality assessment of changes in cardiac tissue composition, including myocyte shape, myocardial fibrosis/collagen, and vascular remodeling. Many working in the field today have little or no training related to recognition of fixation artifacts or common errors associated with quantitative morphology. Unfortunately, such skills had become somewhat of a lost art during the ages of cardiac physiology in the mid-20th century and molecular biology, gaining prominence by the mid-1970s. Consequently, cardiac remodeling studies today are often seriously flawed to the point where data are not reproducible and subsequently researchers may be chasing the molecular basis of a non-existent or erroneous phenotype. The current unacceptably high incidence of irreproducible data is a serious waste of time and resources as noted recently in comments by the NIH Director. The goal of this talk is to improve the ability of clinicians/scientists to better evaluate accuracy of the remodeling literature and to provide practical solutions for improving the quality of remodeling data. The goal of researchers in the field should be to routinely publish highly reproducible morphologic data that stand the test of time and contribute to our fundamental knowledge of cardiac remodeling and the molecular mechanisms that drive it. A review article on this topic can be found at the following web site. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25957219