Deadly ape heart disease puzzles zoos

Although the gorilla was given medications for heart disease in humans, his condition kept deteriorating. He lost 80 pounds (20 percent of his body weight), was accumulating fluid in his abdomen. And by the summer of 2004, his heart pumped just 10 percent of the blood his body needed.

Babec gets a pacemaker
With Babec in the final stage of heart failure, the zoo risked a procedure never before attempted on a gorilla: the implantation in Babec's chest of an advanced pacemaker that corrects the heart's electrical circuitry and restores its ability to contract properly.

Today, Babec's prognosis is excellent. He's dropped the excess water weight, his heart and other organs work more efficiently, and his heart and pacemaker are continuously monitored.

Neal Kay, a cardiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Heart and Vascular Center who volunteered to perform the operation, later remarked that the only reason Babec still greets visitors to the Birmingham Zoo is that "we got to him in time."

Such intervention could save individuals like Babec -- but still largely unaddressed were questions of why gorillas develop heart disease in the first place, and how to halt the disease's progression.

That's why in November 2006 -- three months after Mopie and Kuja died at the National Zoo -- ape experts, human cardiologists, and zoo epidemiologists, pathologists and managers from around the country gathered at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago to establish what they called the "Gorilla Health Project."

Their first task: To build a National Gorilla Cardiac Database. With it, veterinarians could track rates of heart disease and death and try to learn why scar tissue was replacing cardiac muscle in apes.

To Kristen Lukas, chair of the Gorilla Species Survival Plan for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the project marks "a sea change" in how zoos will care not only for gorillas, but a host of other endangered species in captivity.

This level of networking between veterinary and human medical experts from universities, hospitals and animals rights groups "just never happened before," she says.

Meehan, the Chicago veterinarian who has worked with gorillas since 1979, expects the initiative to bring animal care forward a quantum leap from, say, the 1960s, when gorillas were originally brought to North American zoos and staff struggled just to keep the captive population alive.

Wild research
Gathering new data will present challenges, of course. One is the need for echocardiograms of apes. To do the test, a gorilla must be anesthetized, "which carries a certain amount of risk," says cardiologist David Liang of Stanford University, a consultant to the Gorilla Foundation in California.

Another option, some experts say, might be to perform biopsies on affected gorillas to obtain tiny samples of heart muscle. This, too, would require anesthesia.

Many primatologists and veterinarians consider diet a prime suspect of heart disease in captive animals. And exploring that may require extensive study of the mortality of western lowland gorillas in the wild, they say -- which, for many reasons, is tricky.

Gorillas in the wild tend to die younger, meaning not as many live long enough for age-related disorders to show up. Moreover, male silverbacks -- the king of gorilla society -- often hide symptoms of illness because they fear they may be challenged by younger males.

Still, research in the wild has paid off before. Not long ago, for example, it was learned that lowland gorillas, which are primarily herbivores, wade into swampy lake areas and eat vegetation growing underwater.

"There was no way of knowing that sort of thing was happening until somebody went out there to Africa and noticed what the gorillas were doing," says primatologist Joseph Erwin of the Foundation for Comparative and Conservation Biology in Needmore, Pa.

Ellen Dierenfeld, a gorilla nutritionist at the St. Louis Zoo, says that a member of the ginger family, Aframomum melegueta, is a staple food of western lowland gorillas in their native environments.

Some scientists say Aframomum is a powerful antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal and anti-inflammatory "natural drug," which may serve as a preventive medicine for the gorillas. But this and other native African plants are often not part of zoo gorillas' daily diets.

‘Full circle’
The Gorilla Health Project's diet and other data should be gathered by early 2009, analyzed and shared later that year, says Pam Dennis, a veterinarian in charge of analyzing the information.

"The important thing is that we're now working to prevent the diseases in the first place," says Dennis, an epidemiologist with the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo and Ohio State University.

"We started out trying to figure out human health by studying animals. Now we're turning to our findings in humans to figure out how to treat animals," she says with a chuckle. "It's come full circle, which is sort of a beautiful thing."

More from msnbc.com   Images: Korean War recollections, in color Brownstein: The risk of Obama rapture New IVF dilemmas make old fears seem quaint Which storm pounded Texas? Take our news quiz T-Mobile sued over 'mandatory' text fees Showdown over carrying guns in national parks

MORE FROM SCIENCE

Science Section Front

Six real-life 'X-Files' Unearthed bones reveal dinosaur dinner party Cavers chart unique 'snowy' river of crystals Lost for 1,600 years, Nero's Olympic site found 70-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton found McKusick, pioneer in medical genetics, dies at 86 Dolly harkens back to deadly Texas storm 7 pandas to stay at earthquake-damaged facility Worms do calculus to find food 3,000-year-old Neolithic site found in China Science Section Front   Add Science headlines to your news reader: