NEW ORLEANS, For the first time, doctors have used muscle cells from a man's thigh to repair his ailing heart. The report was presented at the American Heart Association meeting here on Sunday.

Five months after the procedure was performed, researchers at Hopital Bichat in Paris, France, report that the 72-year-old man with advanced heart failure has "dramatically improved" since the procedure.

During the transplant, Dr. Phillippe Menasche and colleagues with Inserm removed muscle cells from the man's leg, and grew them in the laboratory. Two weeks later, the cells were injected into multiple places in the man's left ventricle--the heart's main pumping chamber.

At the same time, surgeons performed a double bypass to restore blood flow to other areas of the heart muscle. Menasche announced that the patient's health has improved markedly since then and he has a higher exercise tolerance and an increase in the amount of blood pumped by the heart chamber.

The French researcher emphasized that the skeletal muscle cells do not convert to heart muscle cells, but they do appear to contract sufficiently to pump blood.

"They retain their skeletal (muscle feature)," he said, "but this may not be a problem, as the cells do have contractile activity.

"It's not a normal contraction, but it is a definite reproducible improvement," Menasche said.

The team has approval to perform eight more procedures in this preliminary trial.

(From Reuters)