Slashdot Mirror
15-Year-Old Boy Fitted With Robotic Heart
An anonymous reader writes "What do you do when a 15-year-old boy is close to death and ineligible for a heart transplant? If you're Dr. Antonio Amodeo you turn to an artificial solution and transplant a robotic heart, giving the boy another 20-25 years of life. The Italian boy in question suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which rapidly degenerates the muscles and eventually leads to death. Having such a disease renders the boy ineligible for a heart transplant, meaning almost certain death without an alternative solution. Dr. Amodeo found such an alternative in the form of a 90-gram, fully-robotic heart that took 10 hours to fit inside the boy's left ventricle. It is a permanent solution offering as much as 25 years of life and is powered by a battery worn as a belt."
Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy is a progressive, irreversible muscular disorder where the muscle cells literally pull themselves apart due to the lack of a key membrane-stabilising protein, Dystrophin.
So now this boy's heart can't give out for 25 years, you're then only consigning him to die of suffocation as his diaphragm does.
Oh no, ventilator. Well, let's wait for his oesophagus, colon and eye muscles to go...
But he's still alive, just locked into an immobile, artificially ventilated body with a heart that will never stop.
That seems worse than the natural alternative to me.