Jyothi Nagajyothi, Ph.D. and her laboratory at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) have identified what may be the main mechanism for how chronic Chagas Disease, a parasitic infection affecting millions of people worldwide, can cause irreversible and potentially fatal heart damage.
The culprit is in the adipose (fat tissue) which the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi destroys in the course of infection, releasing smaller particles which induce the dysfunction of heart tissue, conclude the scientists in the journal iScience , a Cell Press open-access journal. We are attempting to understand this disease progression from asymptomatic to symptomatic cardiac conditions, so we can better stop the damage before it is done." Jyothi Nagajyothi, Ph.
D., director member of the CDI Chagas is a disease caused by the parasite T. cruzi, transmitted mostly by insect bites.
It afflicts 8 million people in Latin America and 400,000 in the rest of the world. Left untreated, it can cause heart failure years after initial infection. Nagajyothi and her lab focus their research on how fat-storing cells, known as adipocytes, regulate the pathogenesis, progression and severity of infectious diseases including COVID-19 and Chagas, as well as cancers.
The laboratory has shown a significant correlation between body fat, and the phenomenon of ventricular dilation in the heart in experimental Chagas models. In a previous work, the scientists showed that T. cruzi causes oxidative str.