After pythons eat a meal, their organs including their hearts nearly double in size within a day. Now, researchers have learned how the snakes are able to achieve this sort of growth without heart damage, a finding that could lead to new therapies for human heart disease.
After a meal, python blood is so full of triglycerides, a form of cholesterol, that it appears milky, said study researcher Leslie Leinwand, a biologist at the University of Colorado , Boulder. In humans, these fatty compounds would be deposited in heart muscle, but the snakes escape without damage.
The fatty-acid mixture is a long way from being used in human treatments, but the researchers are now testing it in mice with heart disease to see if they can halt or reverse the damage.
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