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Cardiac Patch for a Broken Heart
Roland Piquepaille writes "People who suffered from heart attacks or other heart failures often need transplants because their hearts are essentially non-functioning. But imagine what would happen if it was possible to engineer living heart tissues to fix these broken hearts? This is what bioengineers at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City are starting to make. According to HealthDay News, their patches for broken hearts are made of heart tissue grown in the lab. Right now, animal trials are just starting and it will take at least a decade before human trials begin. But when these living bandages are ready for cardiac care, they'll have the potential to save millions of lives in the world every year."
I prefer my patch for a broken heart. Glen Morangie.
..for my broken heart caused by my mean ex-girlfriend leaving me for another man?
No? Then forget it. Back to alcohol and chocolate for me.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
the heart will work again for a little bit, but other major organs that iteract with the heart will cease to function correctly, and the new patch will somehow allow the heart to be more vulnerable to viruses.
...patches will only be available on the first Tuesday of every month. Any severe heart attacks occuring between these so called "patch days" will have to wait.
This is all very interesting. If and when they do manage to come out with the cardiac patch I would suspect (as well as hope) that they would have patches to fix other tissue types (striated, smooth, etc).
I'm also wondering if it was possible to use cancer research to produce an anti-cancer... No I do not mean a cancer cure, but an infection of healthy living tissue. Is it possible to introduce healthy tissue into a body or system and have it spread in a cancer like fashion repairing everything in its path? That would be way too cool!
--Matt Wong
http://www.themindofmatthew.com
FINALLY, there's hope for Dick Cheney! Now if only they knew how to grow a brain for Georie.
...you were supposed to patch before an attack happened. I guess I was wrong.
My son's bladder was born on the outside - and needed it reversed. His surgeon at the time got to the point before putting it back in the body but then something happened: he moved on. However his new surgeon - Dr. Atala - is a guy renowned in the field for tissue re-engineering. My son's bladder is now back on the inside but one of the exciting things that is happening right now is that he has more of a chance of getting his bladder completely fixed out now than at any other time. His bladder is too small... and needs augmenting. The "traditional" way has been to augment the bladder with intestine tissue (often needing an extra channel for urine excretion), but Dr. Atala has managed to figure out how to augment the bladder - at least AFAIK in animals - with engineered tissue based on the original bladder. And the guy was attracted to our area to continue his research.
I'm excited about this growth area in medicine - not as a doctor or as a medical professional (sorry I am squeamish at blood) - but as a parent of a child who stands to benefit enormously from this kind of research. I hope and pray that this kind of stuff - patching hearts, augmenting bladders, mending broken organs in general - all develops and gets to the point of viability in time.
Mark.
Currently people awaiting donors for hearts are assesed on age & how they live & will they benefit a heart.
I know there are a lot of people who live a good life & then suffer heart failure, but there is also a lot of people simply who simply live badly, they drink and smoke too much, eat too much & they don't exercise.
If there was a quick fix to heart problems, how many people would change their lives? Would they improve their quality of living or would they simply just resume their old ways & end up having to have the procedure again at the expense of the public health system.
Im all for ways of improving our chance of living through medicine, but there are a lot of people who bring upon these conditions because of their own lazyness & over-indulgence. Fixing their hearts won't nessesarily make them want to improve other area's of their life which created the heart problem in the beginning.
With medicine getting better & much more serious conditions being able to be fixed a lot easier, what are the social implications of this, humans are lazy, would it help create a society of people less concerned about their health? And what would that cost?
I'll just stick with my lonely heart, thanks. I've heard that owning one of those is much better than owning a broken one.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
waiting on them to allow this procedure to be used.
My daughter was born eleven years ago needing a heart transplant. The four pediatric cardiologists in this state all argued over which of several procedures would be best, but in the end none of them would do a damn thing to help her because the AMA recommended against all of the procedures except a transplant. Legally the doctors could help her, but they were too afraid of the AMA. In the end, we had to do a transplant. That cost $225,000 for just the procedure plus about $45,000 in the following two years before she passed away. The AMA does a great job of screwing people over. They work very hard to make sure that people stay sick for a very long time to maximize the profit of their members. In the end she died of pulmonary edema. Basically she drowned in her own fluids. Again, the doctors wouldn't do what they could to save her. I had to listen to them whine about what the AMA recommends and what the AMA recommends against. In the end, her last stay in the ICU lasted 17 days and not a single doctor would do a thing. They just watched her die.
Without the AMA, we would have been able to find a doctor that would have helped her soon after she was born. I think that if the AMA had allowed her to start-off healthier, while she might not have lived much longer, she would have had a much happier life and been healthier and more active for a time.
Expect the AMA to fight against this with everything they have since it attacks the profit of their wealthiest members.
Patching is for paranoids, I'd rather check out the bleeding edge release.
The patch will be made entirely of chocolate ice cream.
The male patch will consist of pornography and alcohol.
I had an old teacher who's had TWO artificial hearts. The first one was your standard pump driven noisemaker.
However, the pump mashes up the blood cells and was giving him anemia.
Soooo... They pulled it out and stuck in a new one. This artificial heart has a turbine in it to push the blood along. He no longer has a pulse, just a blood pressure.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
As others pointed out, planting "healthy" tissue that outgrows cancer is just giving someone a worse cancer.
Wow, what a messed up /. story the day ater I found out that my gf has been cheating on me for months (no joke).
G-Force music visualization
Growing heart tissue would be much more demanding requring "exercising" the muscle, plus as the article pointed out there are problems of tissue acceptance, adhesion and syncing the pulse of the muscle patch to the existing heart tissue. Given these hurtles it looks like this technology has many hurtles to jump.
Pursuing an interest in Dictyostelium amoebae provides an starting point to studying chemotaxis and cellular communication.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
atp-get dist-upgrade. Upgrades all the other body parts too.
This really strikes me as an exciting breakthrough. I had heart surgery back in 1984 to repair a hole between my ventricles that drastically increased the viability of my life. Aside from having my ribs stapled together, I have a Dacron (a type of polyester) patch in my heart because the hole was too large to simply sew shut. Aside from basically being in good health since then, I'm always afraid that the growth of my heart in the intervening years is unduly stressing the patch; I was only seven when I underwent the surgery. I've always wondered if I could have my heart repaired properly; what it would mean to my energy levels, strength and peace of mind.
The real question is, could they grow a proper heart or replacement pieces from my genes at all? I had six major life-threatening heart defects that were mostly corrected, but there's always that lingering feeling that things could be better. If not for the surgery, I'm sure I'd be dead by now. Hell, I almost didn't make it past two months. Would something like this work for me? Would it be worth going back in there to complete the repairs?
Who knows. But I have to say this is definitely a thought-provoking piece of information. Unlike people who undergo heart-surgery in their later years, I never had a fully functional heart. Ah, the possibilities!
For those keeping score, this should sate your curiosity:
1. Faulty aortal valve: mostly corrected, slight murmur remains
2. Transposed position (It leans right instead of left): uncorrected
3. Half expected size: repairs later encouraged growth
4. Unknown muscle-tissue grown over heart: removed
5. Large hole between ventricles: covered with Dacron patch
6. Two small holes between atria: sewn shut
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Great news! Another double Quarter-Pounder, please. Extra cheese and bacon.
That's what they're doing.
.. just as natural as the development of language and teamwork ability.
Natural selection, we are enabling our species to maximize its population and survive regardless of obstacles. That way we can benefit from intellectual contributions of everyone (even those who may have a physical problem). Plus, we also want any good genes the person may have (for example, maybe the person has a bad heart, but maybe they also have an awesome improved kidney gene).
In a couple generations we may be able to do gene therapy and eliminate any detrimental genes.
So yes, our curing people of medical conditions is part of nature
Than why when I walk out of any grocery store, movie theater or college classroom in America will half the time I be confronted with cigarette smoke? It is my responsibility to protect myself but how can I do that, shoot the smoker in self defense?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
If people in general were not so stupid, lazy, and irresponsible, we wouldn't have so many fatasses in the states. There would not be nearly as much obesity and therefore Heart Disease would be less prevalent.
If people would walk, bike, run, or skate to their destinations more often we would have less of an obesity problem also. Moderation in everything, including moderation.
Cities DO have areas which are not polluted by car exhaust and other harmful things. Have you ever been to Manhattan? There's a small place called Central Park which can be accessed pretty quickly from just about the entire borough. Even in the areas further from Central Park are smaller parks and recreational areas within the apartment complexes. This is not the only city I have been to with recreational areas. In South Korea there is Seoul, Daegu, Pusan, Chinhae and countless other cities with parks. I have seen all of those as well, and they are nice. I have no doubt that most major cities have areas reserved for just that reason.
I don't get the feeling that I'm being gagged by diesel exhaust unless a bus just drives in front of me while accelerating, no matter which place I'm in. If it were such a big concern, more people would be getting carbon monoxide poisoning.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?