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Girl's Heart Regenerates With Artificial Assist
Socguy writes with news about a 15-year-old girl who has become the first Canadian to have an artificial heart removed after her own heart healed itself. "Doctors at the Stollery Children's hospital implanted the Berlin Heart, a portable mechanical device that keeps blood pumping in an ailing heart, so she could survive until a transplant became available. But over the next few months, Melissa's overall condition improved dramatically, and her heart muscle regained much of its strength. After 146 days on the Berlin Heart, Melissa underwent surgery to have the device removed."
the broken heart jokes (I couldnt tink of one)
In other news, her old artificial heart is to be given to her closest friend.
... all that can be said is "that's really fucking cool." Seriously. Good for her. No immunosuppressants. Hopefully a full recovery.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Did the invasive surgery trigger a healing response, or did she just need a boost until natural processes finished the job?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
A 13 year old boy recovered without a transplant with the help of one of these things as well.
Maybe her heart didn't regenerate. Maybe she just has two, because she's a klingon.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Like many slashdotters, I've had my heart broken over and over, and it keeps regenerating. Like that Jody Foster thing....I was convinced she was serious, but I just couldn't get past security.
Our God is indeed a God of Mircales and Wonders. The hand of the great Healer is clearly at work for this sweet girl.
Thank you, Jesus! Praise be to your precious name.
Quote from the article you cited :
As one in three children recover from myocarditis on their own, the medics decided to wait and see if Jack's own heart could grow strong enough to work on its own without the need for a transplant.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It's nice to know that even in this fucked up world somethings can go right.
If you only had a brain, you would know who her closest friend was that needed a heart.
to real-life unreal tournament.
don't remember where, but i recently read that it's well known that the human heart is capable of some serious self healing, so i'm not that surprised by this.
did it heal beyond what they thought was possible/normal? or is it only under certain conditions that weren't met this time?
Gregory House, eat your heart out! Er, wait...
Without whom this little girl would have died. Oh, congratulations to Jesus for getting around to saving the little girl's life.
I'd imagine that if more people had donated money to the church, Jesus would have been able to get to her sooner rather than later. Jesus loves us, but he needs money. So get off of your chair and donate some money now, so her little friend might be saved.
good thing the removal surgery went well. It sure would have sucked if she died after all that!
I had a PFO closure to stop severe headaches and of course future problems (like stroke).
PFO remains in about 1/4 of the population (everyone has it as a baby). Mine was sealed by a non-invasive catheter device. It's basically a titanium mesh of two discs connected together. They release one side of the disc in the exterior hole then move out and release the other connected side on the outer side (making sure it's a tight fit). My hole was about 1/2 an inch, which is on the large end.
The heart then grows tissue around the mesh and seals the hole. Of course you do still have the mesh in you (just don't go near anything that puts out 3 Tesla).
I wonder if they could develop a similar type of procedure for major problems. A mesh that can be molded and placed into the injured areas. Build a strong outer layer that the body can break down over time, and perhaps nutrients embedded in the mesh's core to allow the heart to regrow all affected tissue.
Something witty goes here.
20th December 2006 and I'm watching my girlfriend Rachel die from sudden congestive heart failure.
I remember thinking, "Why isn't there a machine to pump the blood so her heart can rest?"
I hope this thing gets everywhere to save other people and their partners.
J1M.
Like many slashdotters, I've had my heart broken over and over
...realizing once again that the 22 year old beautiful blonde girl with huge boobs on MySpace that just sent you a friend request is really your fat unemployed neighbor Ned?
Meh - as long as he has decent boobs too then it's okay
which is totally what she said
Save the cheerleader, save the world!
Why remove? It's never a bad thing to have a spare heart or two, for HA purposes. Just imagine if the main one fails!.
Don't you know, the heart has adult stems in it. Hell, most of the body has them. Body can regenerate itself. No surprise to me
\
Better article with quotes and a picture of her and the Berlin Heart.
Claire Bennett?
More likely, her heart was temporarily (and rapidly) damaged by some sort of illness that attacked her heart. (Weird virus, bacteria, maybe a toxin.) As long as THAT doesn't happen again she'll be fine.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
a decade ago this device was a big machine to be carried around on a trolley. But back then it showed that a heart could regain it's old strength and the device was used to help the heart by doing the work till then. I was a student of medicine at the Humboldt university of Berlin, Germany back then and I learned a lot about organs and their strength to recover. It's not the heart, other organs can regain their power as well. If the body survives their outage, which could be assisted with such machines.
cb
And its Kobe from center court, "Girl's Heart Regenerates" With Artificial Assist ~Sticky /Boooo!
i thought Canada was supposed to have bad healthcare. hmm...
Two lungs, two kidneys, a liver which regenerates given half a chance. Why no second pump. Seems like a design failure to me.
Deleted
My grandfather had heart bypass surgery because the existing pipes were all clogged up... including the EXTRA ones his body had grown as bypasses around the others. not bad for a 50 year old.
Just give it a little time.
This is Slashdot. I'll be you are a heart researcher and you don't have a wife.
Running motor also needs some rest, so does heart. I read some where, that a person heart started beating regulary after his heart was giving some rest(stopped in place without ripping it out), blood circulation kept going by machine. The heart 'healed' itslef just like we immobilize a leg-muszle when it is torn..
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
There was a story a couple of years ago about a clinical trial at Cedars Sinai of an artificial liver developed by Dr. Achilles A. Demetriou. The device uses a bioreactor containing cells from pig livers The people they tried this on were all in end-stage liver failure and about to die. The idea was to tide them over until a transplant became available.
d izin_gesundheit/bericht-28316.html
A couple of them died from the effects of the surgery. Some others lasted long enough to finally get a transplant. But in several others their own livers managed to regenerate to the point where a transplant was no longer needed.
This led to a bigger study at 20 US research centers. The results were that artificial liver reduced mortality by 44 percent:
http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/me
A new record for invoking Godwin's Law!
Infuriate left and right
...and muscles only heal and rebuild themselves when given time to rest.
A lot of people go to the gym and over-do it with the weights and do not rest enough. Generally you get better results if you only exercise any given muscle group no more than every other day, with rest days in-between. For example, work arms one day, then legs the next, etc. Plus take weekends off entirely. Of course, this depends on what you want to achieve--if you want to look like a scarecrow/extreme-marathon-runner then go ahead and do intense cardio all week.
Anyways I KNOW that works from personal experience--lifting weights doesn't make you have muscles, it only causes muscles to rebuild more during the rest days. No rest, no big improvements in strength. The same goes with injured muscles--you can't train through such an injury and expect it to heal very quickly.
I'n mo doctor, but I can guess the heart, being composed largely of a type of muscle tissue, responds in the same way. The problem is, the heart can never get any rest or we'd die--it always has to be pumping and working at a certain level. It isn't that the heart CANT heal, it just can't do it well if it can't get rest (athletes that train and compete through injuries end up with chronic problems later in life, after all). These ventricular-assist devices take a great deal of load off the heart and allow it to heal better and with less scarring or other permanent damage.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought human heart cells couldn't reproduce?
Heart cells are mostly muscle cells, which undergo cell division and regeneration just like any other muscle cells. You're thinking of neurons (brain cells) which do not regenerate and replenish themselves.
I am Jack's heart. There are two out of three chances that I will succumb to myocarditis.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprisee.
"There are preliminary indications that primitive cells like stem cells exist in the human heart. Stem cells may have the ability to develop into the various cardiac cell types and form new healthy functioning myocardium. If we can prove the existence of cardiac stem cells and make these cells migrate to the region of tissue damage, we could conceivably improve the repair of damaged heart muscle and reduce heart failure," says Anversa.
Cardiac muscle cells, however, do not reproduce after a certain point:
Not all cells from multicellular organisms are still able to divide, though. Once the heart is full sized, the heart cells in a human body do not divide anymore. They no longer have that ability. When a person has a heart attack and some heart cells die, the heart is permanently damaged the heart can't just replace those dead cells.According to Doris Taylor (Departments of Medicine and Surgery at Duke University Medical Center. She did post-doctoral work in cardiac (heart) molecular biology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.)
The heart cannot repair the damaged muscle because its muscle cells cannot reproduce, Doris explains. You are born with all the heart cells you will ever have. Your heart grows because the cells become larger, not because they multiply. However, other muscles do have the ability to repair themselves because they contain cells called myoblasts, which can reproduce.It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The company "Berlin Heart" is the creator of INCOR and EXCOR -- in corpus, ex corpus?
The mentioned article is rather bad as it is written as if "Berlin Heart" was a new description for a specific device.
I don't understand some journalist these days...
took me a google search to find out.
WTPOUAAIYHTEIA? AAUTAF-UP,STOCATTOTOTWPET. BHTEYA,YDTPOUO,SYHTTTEPA(N:TA,AN A),IATTIAF. OC,TIATPYAATUH,BFSRIIYASETRHLOA"J"TWB. MN. (What's the point of using an acronym if you have to explain it anyway? Acronyms are used to abbreviate frequently-used phrases, such that one can avoid the task of typing out the whole phrase every time. By having to explain your acronym, you defeated the purpose of using one, since you had to type the entire phrase anyway (note: that's anyway, and not anyways), in addition to typing its abbreviated form. Of course, there is always the possibility you are attempting to use humor, but for some reason I imagine you are smart enough to realize how lame of a "joke" that would be. Maybe not.
Let's stick to tech, guys.
Sure she's receiving top-quality cutting-edge health care...but she had to wait six months to get the artificial heart!
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Go, City of Champions, Go!
Yes, this is a miracle. What's also beautiful is that her parents did not have to sell the house to afford her treatments because in Canada, IT'S FREE!!
iTx Technologies: Open source development in Montreal
Let's see: you install a device to help pump without removing the heart, and heart heal itself...
Maybe the heart was too tired!
Actually I heard the same from a chinese acupuncturist: the organs can get tired, so they know which points to press in order to stimulate organs (a reflex), and therefore they can improve the health on any organ, without knowing the disease (since organs are supposed to be able to heal themselves, given enough energy).
So we you put the artificial pump allow the heart to rest and the heart heals itself. If they remove the pump, the heart will get tired again.
So the solution is to go an acupuncturist (hopefully one who studied in China with real acupuncturist AND has already healed other people with heart disease, so that he lnows the points he has to press).
have been implanted since the 1970s to help the native heart recover. What is amazing is that this works even with 40 year old people, not just children.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
That's nothing. They transplanted an asshole from Texas into the White House and now the blood flow in Iraq has increased exponentially.
How the fuck can a 15-year old girl's wealth generation ability be enough for some fancy artificial heart?? Her parents better have paid for it, or otherwise it distorted the market and reduced my ability to make more profits.
There was an excellent Outer Limits episode (1x05) of exactly this kind of an event, but of course Socialist propaganda was injected into it to make the ending morally repugnant.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
I think that is great. I wish that would work on the liver.
Pat Jensen