Researchers used mice to develop a mathematical model of a myocardial infarction, popularly known as a heart attack.

The new model predicts several useful new drug combinations that may one day help treat heart attacks, according to researchers at The Ohio State University.

Typically caused by blockages in the coronary arteries — or the vessels that supply blood to the heart — these cardiovascular events are experienced by more than 800,000 Americans every year, and about 30% end up dying. But even for those who survive, the damage these attacks inflict on the muscles of the heart is permanent and can lead to dangerous inflammation in the affected areas of the heart.

Treatment to restore blood flow to these blocked passages of the heart often includes surgery and drugs, or what’s known as reperfusion therapy. Nicolae Moise, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in biomedical engineering at Ohio State, said the study uses mathematical algorithms to assess the efficacy of the drugs used to combat the potentially lethal inflammation many patients experience in the aftermath of an attack.

“Biology and medicine are starting to become more mathematical,” Moise said. “There’s so much data that you need to start integrating it into some kind of framework.” While Moise has worked on other mathematical models of animal hearts, he said that the framework detailed in the current paper is the most detailed schematic of myocardial infarctions in mice ever made.

The research is published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Represented by a series of differential equations, the model Moise’s team created was made using data from previous animal studies. In medicine, differential equations are often used to monitor the growth of diseases in graph form.

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