Fish that regrows cardiac tissue could mend human hearts

Science and medicine are always making new strides every day.  It is amazing the things that are discovered every day and how life changing they can be.  There are no ends to what the medical field will discover next.  Something is always happening, and being discovered.  The most recent strides being made is in the area of heart.  The heart is the most important structure of the body that keeps everything working properly.  If the heart is not functioning correctly then everything else falls apart.  The heart is a delicate part of the structural complex, and needs to be handled delicately when being tampered with.  It is essential that nothing goes wrong with the heart, or it is injured in any way.  A small tear in the tissue could cause major problems.  It is important in the medical field to find ways to mend things like this in the heart, in the most effective way possible.  The most recent advancement in this is a fish.  The zebrafish, may be the answer to all heart transplant surgeries; forever ending their purpose in the world.  This amazing little fish has the ability to they can regenerate damaged cardiac tissue at an incredible rate.  In a week it is able to repair as much as 20 percent of it's heart muscle.  Medical researchers are working with the British Heart Foundation in hopes to gain insight into how the fish's ability could lead to the development of new treatments that eventually will allow the human heart to heal itself one day. There are enough similarities in the structures of a zebrafish and human heart that the idea is possible.  In a human heart it contains a significant number of latent steam cells that could be stimulated to regenerate cardiac tissue, like the zebrafish does.  The only matter is that we must learn from the zebrafish and begin to adapt it to human hearts.   Steps have already been made; the zebrafish's heart contains a protein called thymosine beta-4, which triggers the growth of the epicardium membrane that surrounds the heart.  New heart-repairing drugs based on this protein are already being researched.  The development of this technology won't extinguish the onset of heart disease itself, it does however offer hope that heart disease sufferers can eventually make a full recovery, plus it could mean the end for the need of heart transplant surgeries by enabling a heart attack survivor to regenerate the damaged cells.  This is a huge breakthrough because heart disease is a leading cause of death in the U.S.  If this idea is successful it could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives every year in America alone.  It is ironic that such an enormous problem could be solved by a tiny fish.  Just goes to show you can never predict what might happen in the medical field, and what things will produce an outcome in the world of science.