A PARASITE common in the developing world could help researchers develop drugs to treat heart disease, the biggest killer in the West.
Ronald Stanley鈥檚 team at the University of Wales in Bangor has discovered that one of the worms that causes the disease schistosomiasis, which affects around 300 million people around the world, can prevent fibrous deposits building up in arteries. This can cause heart attacks by cutting off blood flow to the arteries that supply the heart.
When the team injected the parasite into mice prone to atherosclerosis, it halved the number of artery constrictions and the rats鈥� cholesterol levels also fell, they will report in a paper in Parasitology. High cholesterol levels in the blood are known to make patients prone to heart disease. Stanley believes that the beneficial effect of the worm might explain why it often persists in small numbers in someone鈥檚 blood long after causing an acute infection.
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鈥淏ut I really can鈥檛 see people queuing up for a syringe full of worms,鈥� says team member Christopher Jackson, a heart expert at the University of Bristol. So the next step will be to find the chemical that has the beneficial effect, he says. This could form the basis for new drugs.
There may be several factors, though. Stanley thinks that the worm鈥檚 effect is broader than simply lowering blood cholesterol. For example, the parasite also helps to break down fibrinogen, a protein involved in forming blockages.