In a study published in the journal Cell, Postdoctoral Scholar Saurabh Yadav, Assistant Professor Vineet Augustine and their colleagues describe a comprehensive new picture of heart attacks and their resulting damage by connecting the heart, the brain and the nervous and immune systems.

Much like our eyes and ears convert light and sound from our environment into information the brain can understand and process, the new research reveals that a heart attack relays cardiovascular information to the brain via sensory neurons. The new research set out to unveil these connections. The new heart attack “maps” resulting from the study offer novel treatment opportunities under new perspectives of heart attacks as cross-connected systematic events, rather than isolated episodes.