Artificial hearts

These mechanical devices, known like LVADs, are used at the moment in patients with very severe cardiac deficiency, while they are hoping to receive a transplant. The new study demonstrates that the use of a LVAD combined with certain pharmacological therapies, can take to that the hearts undergo positive changes until the point to recover their on-speed operation once is retired the LVAD.

 For the study, the investigators of the Imperial College of London and the Foundation Royal Brompton & Harefield of the National Service of Health of the United Kingdom, they applied this combination of therapies to 15 very ill patients. Of these 15, 11 recovered. From them, the 88 percent had not returned to later suffer diseases of the heart five years. Its quality of life was considered like almost normal.

The transplant of the heart of a donor has been during many years the best possible treatment for people with severe cardiac deficiencies. It has demonstrated to be very successful but it has not lacked limitations, particularly the shortage of donors and the risk of the rejection to the organ.

This therapy allows to alleviate to the pressure in the waiting lists, also offering to the patients a good alternative to the heart of a donor: its own and healthy heart.

The study also puts of relief the fact that the degenerative processes with cardiac deficiencies in “final phase” can be reverted and that the heart has a certain capacity to regenerate by its own means. Therefore, the results of this investigation stimulate the therapeutic search of other strategies and objectives in this field in expansion of the regenerativas therapies.

The LVADs works connecting them to the left ventricle of the heart, directly or by means of a tube. They take the rich oxygen blood from the left ventricle they lead and it to a mechanical pump. This one drives then the rich oxygen blood towards another tube that is connected to the aorta. Once the blood arrives at the aorta, it can be transported to the rest of the body.

The new passage for the investigators is a clinical study on a large scale, in several centers, that will have to until now endorse the good results obtained with this therapeutic approach.

The medical advances do not stop to surprise to us. A boy of 15 years of Italy is the first infantile patient in receiving a transplant of artificial heart. The patient suffers of muscular dystrophy of Duchenne (or progressive muscular dystrophy). Due to his condition, the boy was not eligible for the lists of donation of organs.

The boy was in very bad state, and to few days to die without treatment. Therefore, the surgeon Antonio Amodeo made a thrown decision: to realise a transplant to him of artificial heart with the hope to save the life to him to the boy. In opposition to many interventions of this type, Amodeo did not think that this one would be a temporary remedy, but permanent.

This implanted artificial heart consists electronically of an activated hydraulic pump, placed inside the thorax to reduce the infection risks. It receives his energy through a cable that leaves by the left ear, which of a battery that the patient porthole in the belt. This battery recharges every night to the electrical current, as if anyone was a movable telephone.

The artificial heart measures approximately four centimeters in length and weight almost 400 grams. After 10 hours in the operating theater, the surgery was a total success. With this device, one calculates that it has won between 20 and 25 years of life. This one is the first time that an apparatus of this nature is implanted in a boy, which abre to very many possibilities human beings that they require of heart transplants, but that by their enfermendad are not candidates for the selection processes.

 Transplant of an artificial heart