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.

Comments

Re:Other neat tech from the article

[FreddyKnockout]

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.

Re:Uhh

[dstiggy]

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.

rebuilding

[blahlazer]

this will go great with my brain heatsink.

Cardiology primer

[neapolitan]

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.