Slashdot Mirror
Heart Corset to Reduce Congestive Heart Failure
Scientists have designed a new "heart-reinforcing corset" to help combat congestive heart failure. While there isn't a large degree of understanding of the condition, many believe that the heart expands in order to pump more blood as a reaction to damage or valve problems. This expansion generally exacerbates the problem, so the new reinforcing band is attempting to control the expansion of the heart thereby reducing the chance of failure.
Oops...wrong kind of corset?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It seems like, we never ask that question with every medical breakthrough. Should we really be more inclined to wait for "the mass produced heart corset with McDonald's like installation service"
Lest yeah laugh at my McDonald's surgery reference, ask yourself this. Does getting a sandwich at a fast food restaurant have a lower risk of error than getting open heart surgery? I would be willing to bet that there are a higher percentage of people that get a bad open heart surgery result than there are people that get bad sandwiches. And that, my friends, is why medicine costs so much, for so little, in the United States.
This is my sig.
If your heart can't swell out, it will either constrict itself or "swell in". Result either case would be heart failure.
How would that affect normal physiological functioning? The heart pumps more often because it needs to get that blood out. By restricting that pumping function, the parts of the body that need it won't get as much blood. Anyone see any problems with this idea?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Perfect! Just in time for the ren faire this weekend. You think they'll be selling these there yet?
I suspect a new wave of crossdressing as new spam convinces people of the power of corsets.
Table-ized A.I.
Now your heart looks like a slut.
Alternate punch line:
Now your heart looks like it belongs in the band Heart.
this will go great with my brain heatsink.
Humorous to some, good news to others.
I've been waiting for an advancement like this.
Time to see my cardiologist.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The obligatory link to information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestive_heart_failure
Having had congestive heart failure I can say that this device is only going to be useful in a limited number of cases. In my case, this device would not have helped as my first bout was caused by right ventricular hypertrophy due to aortic insufficiency and the second was a bout of pneumonia that cause fluid build up in the pericardium. The device may have helped the first time around to prevent the right ventricular hypertrophy, but would not have helped in the second as it would not have eliminated the cause.
Still, it's good to see that medical technology is progressing! Better than valvuplasty and dacron VSD patches!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Have you ever looked in to how much of the "cost of health care" is administrative costs?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
They did this in the new Outer Limits already... remember the old guy who just wouldn't die and wanted the heart corset instead of giving it to the teenage girl. :)
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
...does this make my heart look fat?
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
Does it semm to anyone else that designs for medical mechanical devices mostly look like something you might think of yourself using duct tape and hose clamps?
This along with my new brain heat sink allows be to overclock my body and mind.
Once you have the heart restriction and brain cooler, then you take this cocktail of drugs including ginko, cocaine and performance enhancing drugs.
Now you can double the performance of you mind and body, without fear of you heart exploding or a brain blood vessel rupture.
The downside is that you effectively age twice as fast.
My understanding is that the heart enlarges to push blood better through blood vessels that have become smaller from plaque buildup. While the corset may prevent this; it doesn't fix the problem of the arteries occluding from poor diet, smoking, diabetes, and genetic predisposition. The way they fix this now is through arterial grafts to create a bypass. This technological corset application might help somewhat but it's skating the issue of preserving cardiovascular health. I have no medical training but I have learned about this the hardway by caring for a parent that has had several heart attacks. A word of advice: Not all doctors are equal or willing to take risks becuase of the lawsuit factor. Don't let it discourage you! Find THAT doctor who wants to help. He/She can make all the difference between languishing in a bed on meds or a recovery at home with new functioning arteries and a chance to resume life(Not instantly of course).
It sounds like it's a related concept to this older concept but much less risky and invasive.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Forgive me in my ignorance but if a heart expands in order to pump more blood because there isn't enough blood flow, wouldn't this device essentially cause insufficient blood flow, which, depending on where it happens, will cause a stroke?
I'm a cardiologist - a couple of big points here...
Five second primer on cardiology: All muscles have a force-strength relationship that increases with distance stretched. That is, the farther you stretch a muscle, the more forcefully it will contract. This is called the Starling relationship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starling_law
Thus, when your heart is failing, what does it do? It allows itself to become more distended, increasing the stretch of each muscle cell, which increases the force of each beat. People that have heart failure often have big, dilated hearts in the body's attempt to generate every bit of force from it.
Unfortunately that dilation has negative effects. Specifically, after a while the heart can not handle the increased stretch and wall strain, and muscle cells will start to fail / die, and they become altered at the cellular level in ways that is detrimental over the long term.
Cardiac banding as described is a way to put a "girdle" on this failing heart, to *prevent further dilation* in hopes of minimizing negative consequences as above. It is used in *an already failing heart* in a kind of palliative sense. The summary is a bit misleading - it makes it sounds as though this patches it to prevent failure.
The idea is widely proposed and you can find it in many textbooks already; the patent by this Stanford group is for a specific implementation / material / technique. There are a few companies making banding / mesh devices, but none are in completely mainstream use yet. I work at one of the largest quaternary care centers, and have seen only two.
One of the concerns is that medium to long term outcomes are not really established, and this may give a restrictive effect -- that is, prevent adequate filling of the heart and impair blood circulation in that method. It is an active area of research, however, and IMHO is quite exciting.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Without reading through the patent, It would almost certainly have to be on the inside of the pericardium. Otherwise, the heart would squeeze the pericardium cells in between. I just wonder if the heart cells would survive this as well. It strikes me that after a length of time the outer cells would be cut off from blood as well. Kind of like putting a bad around a growing child's leg. Of course, this is more likely to occur in older folks, so, it may give them more time. But strikes me as treating the symptom and not the disease.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...Be Slim My Aching Heart.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This story has no relevance to any of the usual slashdot themes. But it's obvious why it was posted. To get a few laughs out of corsets-for-men jokes. It's not like I had high expectations to begin with. But this is a new low.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
are ready to accept their nobel prize in medicine
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I can think of quite a few people that I'd like to put a brain corset on. How about getting these folks some nice old fashioned encephalitis.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Didn't Tony Stark do something like this for his
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man suit?
so they can look good in music videos?
Was just at the Maryland RennFest. Having gone there for the past 8 years, we've formulated some rules that should be enforced, but sadly are not.
1) Just because it is acceptable to wear a "saucy wench" outfit doesn't mean you look good in it. Hence, mandatory 2 minutes in front of a 3 way mirror for anyone in garb prior to admittance.
2) Women should not be allowed to wear bells around their waist with a belly dancer outfit when said belly is drooping to over aforementioned bells.
2a) Women should not get cranky when folks stare at #2 above - you just adorned your fat rolls with shiny, noisy things, and you expect it NOT to draw the eye?
3) Re. "push-up" corsets - if it makes your boobs look like they are squashed in a mammogram, it's the wrong size (this is from my wife, and I assume the female slashdotters will understand. I have no clue what it means)
4) For the men - your not fucking Sauron, so don't bring the 7 foot tall black staff with the wings and the crystal ball on top. It gets in everyone else's way and will not, repeat NOT, get you laid. Period. No, really.
5) And added just this year - the Trekkers were bad enough, but furries? FURRIES?! I had to explain to my wife what the difference between a furry and a plishie is .
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
They are usually young. Of course if they get sick then everything changes.
A true story.
I was going into a grocery store near my office to pickup some diet soda. There was a group trying to get people to sign a petition that would stop free inoculations for the children of illegal immigrants. I kind of lost it with them. I asked them if they wanted to see children in iron lungs again? Did they realize that vaccines where not 100% effective and if there where a large population that wasn't inoculated that it would increase the chance that they, there grand children, or their children might get sick with polo? I finally ask them "Do you believe in a God? How do you think God would feel about you being so selfish that you will allow children to get sick and or die because of your greed!" They actually left at that point.
So yes their are people like that. And you will see them post on Slashdot a lot.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Victoria's?
Or, of the construction labor/Home-Depot/grocery clerk secrets. Oh, theirs is to reduce expansive gut success...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Last time I checked, McDonalds was failing 100% of the time to make anything edible, but doctors at least save a few people with surgery.
Move all sig!
As are other rankings. It's all about "how socialist" is your medicine, and not a valid comparison. I for one thought that if "the children" were so important, that parents might actually be motivated to pay for their health care. Obviously, "the children" are not so important, and so, somebody else should be responsible for their health care.
If you have insurance in the USA, or a wad of cash, and you need an MRI, for example, you can get one. If you have insurance, and a wad of cash, you wind up getting the best medical care in the world, and most people who live in the USA and have been from abroad will say exactly that.
I for one am sick of hearing about the superior European quality of life brought about by socialism. If the quality of the European world was so great, why do not more Europeans bring children into it. The only thing going on on that side of the world is the smell of decay, an ideologically dead, creatively spent, aging population gradually withering into oblivion, too lacking in will or drive to even reproduce itself.
\
This is my sig.
Somehow I think you'll reconsider your position when you or someone you know survives a car accident
I did survive a car accident. I rolled a car going 50 miles per hour. But, I wore a seat belt, the frame bent and absorbed the blow, and I walked away, unharmed. No doctor required.
This is my sig.
I read about this thing over 2 years ago in popular science or such
There was a group trying to get people to sign a petition that would stop free inoculations for the children of illegal immigrants
My question would be, if the vaccines are so important, then, why do not the parents pay for them? The innoculations aren't -free-. They are paid for out of the taxes. So, that means less for the people of the country who actually, you know, are legal, or at least respect our immigration laws and get the proper H1s, green cards, etc.
If I had been there when you showed up, I would have invited you to pay for the innoculations yourself, and take up a collection yourself. I have my own kids to vaccinate, educate, and cloth, and if illegal immigrants would take the same level of responsibility, then, jeez, we wouldn't have this problem now, would we.
This is my sig.
When i first saw the title i read it as: "Horse corset to reduce congestive heart failure" and i asked myself why the hell do horses need corsets? and why the hell would they reduce congestive heart failure?
At which point i re-read the title (got it correct this time) and commented to myself: "that was one hardcore corsetter that first tried this"
I think i need some sleep
Coming to you live from another dimension.
Decreased blood flow is nasty in its own right too, especially reduced blood flow to the brain. It can mean often dizziness, confusion and/or constant anxiety (due to CO2 poisoning) even _with_ the heart allowed to expand to compensate for the valves malfunctioning. Reduce flow some more and, well, you might start losing neurons fast to lack of oxygen. And those don't regenerate, btw.
Not that the other organs are better off with restricted blood flow either. We're talking basically shock and shock can and does kill.
So basically if you wanted to say that it's better than being dead, well, it's hard to argue with that. But you might actually end up dead sooner _if_ it restricts blood flow enough, than if you waited until your heart fails naturally. You'd also be pretty much in constant shock before you die, which, as I was saying, is nasty.
Now that all is a big "if" there. That all only applies _if_ it indeed decreases blood flow. I'm not saying it does or doesn't, I don't have half the data to make that kind of judgment. I'm just saying that decreased blood flow isn't something to be shrugged off.
Also note that there are other operations that can help there, including getting mechanical valves installed. So there isn't necessarily a dichotomy there. The question is whether this helps more, not whether it's this or you wait until your heart blows up.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You know, I actually agree with you but you are so pompous I just had to rattle you.
It's only a couple billion dollars a year... the feds should do vaccination program, nationwide, and just throw it on the tab. If we can drop a half a trillion on saving the people of Iraq from their own inability to form a peaceful government, I think we can squeeze in vaccinating all the children in the United States, period.
This is my sig.