Tudor Toma(t.toma@ic.ac.uk) | Dec 30, 2001 | 1 min read
Cardiac hypertrophy is an adaptive response to an increase in blood pressure which, despite initial benefits, leads to heart failure and is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease. In January Nature Medicine, Masanori Asakura and colleagues from Osaka University Faculty of Medicine, Osaka, Japan show that shedding of heparin-binding epidermal growth factor (HB-EGF) by ADAM12 plays an important role in the development of cardiac hypertrophy.Asakura et al. found that in cultured rat