Heart Research Center in Göttingen opened

New heart research center opened in Göttingen: Scientists want to network better.

(03.05.2010) A new international heart research center was founded in Göttingen. In order to better explore heart disease, numerous scientific centers have announced an intensive cooperation and founded a heart center. These include the Heart Center of the University Medical Center Göttingen, three Max Planck Institutes and the German Primate Center. The focus of the researchers will be the disease heart failure. Cardiac insufficiency is an accumulation of symptoms of previous coronary artery disease. In most cases, those affected suffered heart attacks, heart attacks, hypertension, or heart muscle inflammation. Patents complain of severe shortness of breath, pain in the chest and have only a very limited exercise capacity. Heart failure significantly reduces the life expectancy of a patient.

The new Göttingen Heart Center sees itself as a research interface between basic research and clinical development. The head of the Heart Research Center Prof. Gerd Hasenfuß explains the cooperation as follows: "We identify the problems in the clinic at the patient and in the laboratories of the scientists, we then work out the solutions and the results should benefit the patient."

It is estimated that around 2 to 3 million people in Germany suffer from heart failure. The "five-year mortality" is 50 percent higher than most cancers, according to the research center. Also for this reason, the heart research center wants to develop new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of heart failure.

Another focus is the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. They can be common in heart failure, but also quite independently. Cardiac arrhythmias should recognize the pathogenic mechanisms and develop new treatment methods. So it will be an issue for the researchers to develop new methods for the treatment of life-threatening arrhythmias (ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation). (Sb)

Click here for the Göttingen Heart Research Center:
www.herzzentrum-goettingen.de