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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."
because they seem to be wholly serious on their usage of the term "permanent"... which would imply to me that it should be lasting a heckuva lot longer than until he's forty.
He has a form of muscular dystrophy. They can't replace all his other muscles too and he'll eventually succumb to other problems related to MD. When you're one foot inside Death's doorway at 15, a solution that keeps you alive until ~40 is pretty darn permanent.
I'd freak out if my heart were powered by something strapped around my waist. The only option would be to build a bullet-proof metal suit with a built-in nuclear power supply. If I had enough energy left over, jet-powered hands and feet along with a dry-witted AI partner in my helmet would be a plus.
I have only read the linked articles, but the description sounds like a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD. This is a pump that helps the heart push blood, rather than replacing the heart, which is what I generally think of when people talk about artificial hearts. It sounds like the innovation here is the size, its use in a child, and the length of time they plan to use it, since it is generally used as a bridge to transplant.
I think they are optimistic in thinking they can get 25 years, since we really haven't evolved the material science to have implantable devices for that long without provoking clot formation or scarring, but it sounds like they didn't have a lot of options here.
I would think that a medical solution that qualifies as "permanent" ought to be one that would at least have the capability of lasting long enough for a normal human life span
On the other hand, it's also something they aren't going to be looking to replace before it's in danger of wearing out.
A blue tarp is a 'temporary' solution to a damaged roof. Fixing the roof and replacing the shingles is a 'permanent' solution, in that you're not normally going to be replacing the shingles again until they're damaged or wear out.
I'm a bit surprised, last I remember they only had the one artificial heart and it was a 'complete' solution, not something that fits in one valve chamber.
I don't read AC A human right
Well, if you remember in "Bicentennial Man", he slowly perfected artificial human organs, until there wasn't much that couldn't be replaced.
I'm a bit surprised at the 20 to 25 year claim. I thought it wasn't more than a year or so ago that artificial hearts, though promising, were never practical for long-term use. At best they were a stop gap measure between the original heart failing, and getting a real flesh donor heart.
I went looking for more information. The most detailed I could find was this 2006 news story
It sounds like they're offering the kid a very optimistic view of life. The article is very short on information, like specifics on the device (who makes it, what it's called, what testing has been done, what have the long term animal trials shown, etc). I'm sure they're very good engineers and doctors, but it would be nice to have more information before people start really believing that they can have an artificial heart with a MTBF of 20 to 25 years.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I know I should lighten up, but I really resent the decay of the term robot. Robots are autonomous devices. They were so when the term was first used in Rossum's Universal Robots.
A mechanical heart is not a robot. It only does work for you in a purely physics definition. (If you allow a physics definition of work for robot, then a lever that bends slightly is a robot -- it reacts to the amount of weight put on it by bending and it does 'work' for you.)
This heart is a mechanical device. It ends there. It is not a robot.
Similarly, remote-controlled devices, no matter how cool, are not robots. You are controlling them. They are not autonomous. We are not fighting the war in Afghanistan with robots. Stop saying that.
This pisses me off not because it's devaluing a term I think will be important someday, when we actually do have robots, but because it reflects a growing (or was it always there?) stupidity amongst the populace. They know what a robot is on a macro level, but they have no idea what this heart is on the most basic mechanical or control level. They don't understand machines of any sort, electronics of any sort, or fine distinctions of logic. They don't think about things and they're more interested in what sounds cool than what's correct.
Years ago, I put an extra question on all our screening tests for job applicants in computer jobs (networking, IT, etc). It was "How does a light bulb work?" The number of people who left the answer blank, answered "I don't know" or answered incorrectly was staggering. Not surprisingly, the people who knew enough to be considered for the computer job also generally knew how a light bulb worked and tended to answer the question in detail with something close to glee.
They constituted a vanishingly small percent of the applicants.
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.
You are absolutely correct that no one can know how he will choose faced with these possibilities. These are hard choices that no one can truthfully predict how they will decide until faced with them in real life.
As a doctor, I guess for me it is something I face on a more daily basis. I see old people who have full-blown dementia, are physically bed-ridden and incontinent and yet sometimes their families want me to do anything to save their loved ones and make them healthy. It never ceases to amaze me how people can be so out of touch with reality.
If it were my parents (which I know that one day it will be), I would like to know when to stop and let them just die without anymore suffering.
So yes, I understand this is a hard choice for a 15y old child and his family and, frankly, I can understand why they chose to cling to any small shred of hope. I just hope that their doctor presented the situation truthfully and didn't paint the child's prospects too positively before the operation (unlike the summery).
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