FIG. 5.

BM cell therapy attenuates the adverse remodeling of the heart after myocardial infarction. Myocardial infarction is caused by occlusion of coronary arteries that supply oxygen and nutrients to the myocardium. In myocardial infarction without bone marrow (BM) cell transplantation, the damaged myocardium undergoes adverse remodeling, in which myocardial walls undergo thinning and the cardiac size expands over time, leading to dilative cardiac failure. When BM cells are applied, the ischemic myocardium in the border zone is partly salvaged by multiple cardioprotective effects of BM cells, which mitigate the thinning of infarcted wall and the expansion of the infarcted segment. This eventually attenuates cardiac-chamber dilatation and cardiac dysfunction. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article at www.liebertonline.com/ars).