Cardiologists and radiation oncologists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis pioneered the use of radiation therapy, a cancer-fighting technique, to treat patients with ventricular tachycardia, a potentially fatal abnormal heartbeat.
The research team discovered that low-dose radiation therapy appears to enhance heart function in various forms of heart failure after analysing the cardiac effects of radiation in a small number of these individuals and modelling the effects of low-dose radiation in mice with heart failure.