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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."
A 13 year old boy recovered without a transplant with the help of one of these things as well.
Her heart just needed a rest until it heals. There were a few cases here in the UK as well and implanting a parallel pump to assist is now considered a standard procedure in many cases where the transplant was the only option. Especially in kids and especially in cases where the heart has been damaged by inflammation. It is a safe bet really - if it heals good, if it does not the patient has a much better chance to survive until a suitable transplant is found. It is a pity that most pumps can take load only off some portions of the heart and not all of it (too much blood in the coffee subsystem to remember which).
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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.
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or is it only under certain conditions that weren't met this time?
presumablely her heart just needed a reduction in workload to allow it to heal, so they used this neat gadget to temporarily assist it until it was fully functional again.
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actually, the human heart has very poor healing capacity. This is why ischemic heart disease eventually kills you; your damaged heart heals by scarring, which leads to decreased cardiac output and eventually apoptotic or necrotic cell death of cardiomyocytes.
IANAHRBMWI (I am not a heart researcher but my wife is)
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I think that you are being a bit harsh there.
Survival figures vary - overall in the USA the five-year survival rate is 71.2 percent for males and 66.9 percent for females. Its better than that in some units. This person's survival after a transplant would be alot higher than this as young people do better on average than older recipiants.
Over 2/3 alive at 5 years, and actually pretty similar at 10 years - bearing in mind that most of bad outcomes are in the first year, and that this is all causes of death, including deaths that were unrelated to the transplant.
The main bad thing about heart transplants is not getting enough hearts.
Having said this, you will see a significant number of people who do not require transplantation due to spontaneous recovery of function.
They still require two major operations - the VAD insertion and the VAD removal - so its not exactly a walk in the park.
And the VAD's such as this can have quite significant complications. The are good but not necessarily the only solution.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Congratulations. You managed to guess the truth. It might have been easier to just read the article, but you managed to figure out what was going on anyway.
;-)
The second sentence in the article:
"Melissa Mills arrived at Edmonton's Stollery Children's Hospital last year after a sudden illness made her critically ill and a candidate for a heart transplant."
It wouldn't be slashdot if people didn't ask questions that were answered by the article