Many patients have been advised by a doctor to rest. But what does that mean? In what Dr. Tami Martino cites the beginnings of a brand new area of research, researchers at the University of Guelph are discovering how rest works to help the body heal from heart disease.
Aside from heart patients, she says her lab’s groundbreaking rest model can also be used to learn how rest can benefit patients recovering from a wide range of serious illnesses, including cancer, infectious diseases, stroke, injuries and neurological problems.
“Our results suggest that rest is an important motor of physiology, opening up a whole new field – the science of rest – and showing how to use it for longer and healthier lives,” said Martino, professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Ontario Veterinary College and Director of the Inter-campus Center for Cardiovascular Studies.
“A little morning rest after healing is a good thing, especially for heart disease recovery,” she said, noting that heart disease is a leading cause of death worldwide.
Martino, graduate student Cristine Reitz and other U of G researchers published their findings from mouse model studies in the journal JCI insight.
Focus on the physical benefits of rest for cardiac patients
As an expert in circadian clock-based medicine, Martino emphasizes that the new study focused on the body rather than the brain.
That means the study isn’t about sleep, she said.
“There is no ‘sleep’ in your heart or other body organs. Sleep is in the brain, but rest is in the body. And remarkably, there is no academic hiatus: we don’t even know how it works. This research achieves that.”
To study rest, the team created a novel mouse model that briefly increases morning rest time. They showed that this period promotes healing in two cardiovascular diseases: cardiac hypertrophy (enlarged hearts) or myocardial infarction.
The results are clear, she said.
A short increase in daily rest is critical to trigger cardiac benefits, Martino said. In mice with cardiac hypertrophy, it protects against the development of cardiac enlargement. After a heart attack, rest helps heart repair to improve long-term outcomes.
Study found how rest affects heart disease outcomes
Rest lowers blood pressure and heart rate, which benefits heart physiology, Martino said.
At the cellular level, rest preserves heart muscle function and acts in disease-specific ways to prevent the progression of heart failure. Looking more closely at the molecular level, the team discovered “quiet genes” triggered by the brief period of rest that correlated with improved healing.
Many of these genes are biomarkers of human heart disease, which explains why the heart benefits from their activation, Martino said: “When you rest, you benefit from genes that are important for heart repair.”
Take your heart meds — and rest your body, says researcher
Looking at common heart drugs, the team found many top-selling and commonly prescribed heart drugs that target rest-responsive genes. “This leads us to speculate that we can improve the effectiveness of the drug along with an additional short daily rest period,” Martino said.
Her previous circadian research was the first to show the benefits of “time of day” dosing of medications or chronotherapy in heart repair by taking some heart medications before bedtime rather than in the morning.
She said nightly dosing of long-acting or delayed-release drugs that target physiological and molecular pathways of rest may help provide the benefits of rest and better recovery in the first few days after a heart attack. “This will delay the morning rise in heart rate and blood pressure to help heart patients rest,” Martino said.
She said this study is the first to create an experimental model of rest, using multiple approaches to show how rest helps the body. “It opens up a whole new field for human health and how it can be used to heal patients and live longer, healthier lives.”
Noting that doctors encourage patients to rest to heal, she said, “Rest is a common human activity and it’s remarkable that we don’t even know how it works.”
She hopes this preclinical study will stimulate advances in rest-based therapies for cardiac patients and basic research into the benefits of rest in serious clinical conditions.
Her research is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
Contact:
dr Tami Martino
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