One of my general “rules for living a healthy life” is to stay as far away from bears as possible — not to mention their bile. But many mainstream doctors disagree and use a synthetic version of a bear bile component, ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA), to treat heart attacks, liver disorders and gallstones. A new rat study published today in Hepatology adds to this list; it offers insight into how the synthetic form of UDCA can slow the flow of electricity within fetal hearts, presenting a potential treatment for arrhythmia.
UDCA is currently used in Western medicine to treat the blockage of bile flow from the liver during pregnancy, a condition known as intrahepatic cholestasis, even though doctors don’t know how it works. “Historically people treated liver diseases with Chinese medicine preparations” of bear bile, says paper author Julia Gorelik of Imperial College London. Eventually doctors identified UDCA as the active ingredient in the bile, “but the mechanism wasn’t known,” she says.
Toxic bile overflow into the bloodstream can cause pain and gallstones, but during pregnancy, the bile acid can also reach the fetus’s heart and cause arrhythmias. From observation, doctors knew that UDCA also curtailed these fetal heart arrhythmias when administered to the mother, but, again, they did not know why.
Some types of arrhythmia result from excessively fast electrical pulses in the heart. In the current study, Gorelik and her colleagues grew rat fetal heart cells known as myofibroblasts in a lab dish and found that UDCA slowed the electrical signals in the tissue (See video embedded below with electrical impulses shown in green.). Because myofibroblasts aren’t normally found in the healthy maternal heart, UDCA would not alter the mother’s heart rhythms and could be used to treat arrhythmia in fetuses as they grow.
Drugmakers produce UDCA for relatively cheap in countries such as the UK. But bears are still farmed and killed for their natural bile for use in traditional Chinese medicine, and the increased use of UDCA doesn’t impact that market, says Adam Dutton of Oxford University who published a paper on the bear market in July. “The demand for wild-killed and farmed bear bile is coming from the traditional Chinese medicine community,” he says, who use it to treat liver problems and epilepsy. “I don’t think they are interested in these studies, though I may be proven wrong.”
Image: By Drew Avery on flickr under creative commons