Many patients have had a doctor tell them to get some rest. But what does this mean? In what Dr. Tami Martino calls the beginnings of a whole new field of research, University of Guelph researchers are discovering how rest works to help the body heal itself from heart disease.
Beyond cardiac patients, he says his lab’s pioneering rest model can also be used to learn how rest can benefit patients recovering from numerous serious illnesses, including cancer, infectious diseases, strokes, injuries and problems neurological
“Our findings implicate rest as a key driver of physiology, opening up a whole new field, the science of rest, and show how to harness it to live longer, healthier lives,” said Martino, a professor in the Department of Science Biomedical Sciences of the Institute. Ontario Veterinary College and Director of the Inter-Campus Center for Cardiovascular Research.
“A little morning rest when healing is a good thing, especially for recovering from heart disease,” he said, noting that heart disease is one of the leading causes of death worldwide.
Martino, doctoral student Cristine Reitz and other U of G researchers published their results from mouse model studies in the journal JCI Insight.
Focus on the bodily benefits of rest for heart patients
Dr. Tami Martino
An expert in circadian medicine based on the body clock, Martino emphasizes that the new study focused on the body rather than the brain.
That means the study isn’t about sleep, he 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 scientific field that studies rest: we don’t even know how it works . That’s what this research creates.”
To study rest, the team created a new mouse model that briefly extends the morning rest period. They showed that this period benefits healing in two cardiovascular conditions: cardiac hypertrophy (enlarged hearts) or heart attack.
The results were clear, he said.
Briefly extending the daily rest period is critical to eliciting cardiac benefits, Martino said. In mice with cardiac hypertrophy, it protects against the development of heart enlargement. After heart attacks, rest helps heart repair to improve long-term outcomes.
The study found how rest benefits heart disease outcomes
Rest lowers blood pressure and heart rate to benefit cardiac physiology, Martino said.
At the cellular level, rest preserves heart muscle function and acts in disease-specific ways to prevent progression to heart failure. Looking more closely at the molecular level, the team discovered “rest genes” triggered by the short period of rest that correlated with improved healing.
Many of these genes are biomarkers of human heart disease, which helps explain why the heart benefits from their activation, Martino said: “By resting, you benefit from genes important for cardiac repair.”
Take your heart meds and rest your body, researcher says
By analyzing common heart drugs, the team found many of the best-selling and most commonly prescribed heart drugs for genes that respond to rest. “This leads us to speculate that we can improve the drug’s effectiveness in conjunction with an additional short period of daily rest,” Martino said.
His previous circadian research was the first to show the benefits of “time of day” drug dosing, or chronotherapy, in cardiac repair by taking some heart drugs before bed rather than in the morning.
He said that nightly dosing of long-acting or delayed-release medications that target physiological and molecular rest pathways can help provide the benefits of rest and better recovery in the first few days after an attack. heart “This will delay the morning rise in heart rate and blood pressure to help heart patients rest,” Martino said.
He said this study is the first to create an experimental model of rest and to use multiple approaches to reveal how rest helps the body. “It opens up a whole new field of human health and shows how to harness it for patient healing and living longer, healthier lives.”
Noting that doctors encourage patients to rest to heal, he 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 spur advances in rest-based therapies for cardiac patients and basic research into the benefits of rest for major clinical conditions.
His research is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
Contact:
Dr. Tami Martino tmartino@uoguelph.ca