Cardiac Stem Cells Cultured From Aged Donors With Ischemic Cardiomyopathy Have an Impaired Regenerative Capacity Due to Altered Responses to Oxidative Stress

Abstract

Aging reduces the ability of organs to maintain homeostasis and respond to stressors. Despite mounting evidence that direct impairment of resident stem cells underlies this phenomenon, studies of cardiac stem cells (CSC) cultured from aged donors have largely focused on extraneous culture outcomes from normal donors rather than the true intrinsic changes in CSCs sourced from aged donors in need of cardiac repair. As such, we studied the effect of advanced donor age and ischemic cardiomyopathy (ICM) on the fundamental mechanisms underlying CSC-mediated cardiac repair while quantifying intrinsic changes within CSCs that may account for this decline.