This page was written by Christopher Spry . This second type of heart disease is called dilated cardiomyopathy or DCM.We have found that EMF is caused by an alteration in one of the blood cells called the eosinophil. Most people have very few of these in their blood, but they can increase in number. It is not the total number of eosinophils that is important in the development of their heart disease, but the fact that they have been stimulated to become activated.
Activated eosinophils have a vastly greater capacity to cause heart damage.
We have developed some special methods to assess this and in the last year we have shown how activation comes about, using some sophisticated laboratory measurements on patients' eosinophil. We are now looking closer at why activation occurs in only some patients, and how this might be prevented. The cause, or causes of DCM has proved rather more difficult to define. We have tried hard to detect a change in the proteins that are used by heart cells to contract and enable the heart beat strongly. We are in the process of developing a number of very precise ways of detecting abnormalities in these proteins.