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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:
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visit randi.org
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...
Call me when somebody survives being ripped to bloody shreds by red-hot shards of metal and we can start talking real-life Unreal Tournament. :P
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
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!
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
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?
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
Just give it a little time.
"Save the cheerleader, save the world!" But Peter already saved the cheerleader so we could save the world in the stupidest and most anit-climactic fashion possible.
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.
"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
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
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