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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.
Yeah, I agree, the second part of TFA is actually more interesting. The posted bit is about an excessively intrusive, potential solution to a preventable problem (stop eating so much Mickey D's people!), but the second bit about the eye glasses, that's actually a fairly logical process. I can't help but prefer logical, non-intrusive processes. The heart procedure is interesting, but it seems a bit much, especially considering TFA even says that they aren't quite sure if the problem is even caused by the heart expanding.
This device probably won't actually constrict heart function. If you make it slack when the heart has contracted and elastic enough it will just help to squeeze the heart during ejection and decrease the force required for the contraction of the heart muscles. Basically since the heart muscle won't have to work as hard it doesn't increase its muscle mass (similar to lifting weights and then stopping). This reduction in afterload has been shown to decrease heart size in certain instances, specifically in some patients who have received Left Ventricular Assist Devices (LVADs). This device is way less intrusive than an LVAD and doesn't require any electromechanical action.
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"?
...does this make my heart look fat?
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
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"
Right now I promise there are a million insurers and healthcare providers trying to work out if this thing will save them more money in adverse events or gain in disability adjusted life years than it'll cost them they offer it. There's also another group somehwere else working on a cheaper one.
I don't quite get your McDonald's analogy, but now I'm hungry for a Big Mac.
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.
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?
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.
We're still the best medical system in the world as far as quality goes ...
... drum fills ...
"Seven years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations. France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th. More recently, the highly regarded Commonwealth Fund has pioneered in comparing the United States with other advanced nations through surveys of patients and doctors and analysis of other data. Its latest report, issued in May, ranked the United States last or next-to-last compared with five other nations -- Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom -- on most measures of performance, including quality of care and access to it. Other comparative studies also put the United States in a relatively bad light."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/opinion/12sun1.html
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
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.
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This is my sig.