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Completely Artificial Hearts Approved
DarrylM writes: "From CBC's web page: 'The first people to have completely artificial hearts could be walking around by July . . . The new artificial hearts fit right into the chest cavity, with a battery pack positioned in the recipient's thorax. The designers said they wanted patients to show no external sign they had an artificial heart.'" Hmmm. I thought the Jarvik-7 was the first artificial heart...
Yeah the Jarvik was the first completely artificial heart to be used by a human, but unfortunately Barney Clark did not survive. I understand that they tried using the Jarvik 7 a few more times after that but the patients kept dying after a few months. They finally gave up on that design and resorted to a different concept, that of, making helper pumps. These are not replacements for the heart. They are implanted next to the heart and help the diseased heart to pump. Apparently, they can help the diseased heart to become more healthy by relieving the amount of work that has to be done. I think Dr. Jarvik is now working on these "helper pumps". It seemed that the completely artificial heart was technically infeasible at this time but who knows how successful this new artificial heart might be?
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
1 and a half HOURS?
Gee, you could have a race between your heart and your notebook, see which runs out of juice first.
LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device) is what he's talking about. They're usually used, as you would guess, on pretty sick people, or during/after a cardiac bypass to help out. It's basically a fancy inflating/deflating balloon in the aorta (main blood veessel coming out of the heart). They make a cool wssst -pssssht noise.
The problem with the artificial hearts was blood clots. This remains to be a problem with any artificial valve used today and so people need to take coumadin (warfarin, aka rat poison) to thin their blood.
Transplants still work the best. I dont think that engineers have come up with any pumps with a MTBF of approx 70 years and 2.7 BILLION cycles.
Mother nature+Evolution = still the best..
..........FULL STOP.
I think they've come up with a new technique to get around the blood clotting problem by smearing the interior of such devices with a sticky finely ground sand that they then expose to blood and allow it to clot. The clotted blood is now firmly glued to interior of the device and I think that is supposed to reduce further risk of clots in the device making their way to vulnerable areas.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
are very widely used for pacemakers to give them a life of ten years or more. I do not understand why such a short-lived battery would be used in a device like this.
If Uncle Fred gets too far away from the inductive recharger he's history. What happens if the charging pad slips in the middle of the night? What happens if he lives in California?
An hour and a half is not a very long window for such an intensely critical device.
I hope this is only the first in what will be a long series of devices whose abilities will progressively improve. If roaming times do not improve then an artificial heart will replace a condition that was a death sentence with a new condition, a boredom sentence.
I think twenty hours of operation per charge should be a minimum desirable goal for any device that would be widely deployed, with even longer periods between recharges required within a set time period by regulating agencies.
In the meantime, I commend researchers who invent alternatives to ever-scarce donor organs. I guess until we can make new organs easily boredom is preferable to death?
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Engineers make lousy doctors. The problem with an impeller (or most other conventional pumping methods) is that it makes tons of blood clots. These proceed to wreak havoc in the body.