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Tiny Pacemaker Can Be Installed Via Catheter
the_newsbeagle writes "About four million people around the world have pacemakers implanted in their bodies, and those devices all got there the same way: surgeons sliced open their patients' shoulders and inserted the pulse-generating devices in the flesh near the heart, then attached tiny wires to the heart muscle. ... A device that just received approval in the EU seems to solve those problems. This tiny pacemaker is the first that doesn't require wires to bring the electrical signal to the heart muscle, because it's implanted inside the heart itself, and is hooked onto the inner wall of one of the heart's chambers. This is possible because the cylindrical device can be inserted and attached using a steerable catheter that's snaked up through the femoral artery."
The things we can do now adays in medicine are shocking...
Ah, through the femoral artery. My imagination went to a much more horrifying place when I read "catheter."
I wonder how susceptible these things are to strong magnetic fields in MRI machines. I'm not worried about it leaping out of someone's chest, a la Alien. I wonder if it can (if it even needs) to detect those fields and temporarily turn itself off like other pace makers.
Patented to the hilt, I'm sure. I doubt there are any open source projects of this type, so once again humanity is gripped firmly by the invisible hand of the profit motive.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
The quickest way to a man's heart is through his catheter.
Should they call it a "pissmaker"?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Say, the patient takes a fall or some other shock to body - perhaps jogging lightly. Can the tiny device jump out of its place inside the heart? This sounds like an instantly deadly "clog".
"Well, there's a delicate corneal inversion procedure... a multi-opti-pupil-optomy. But, in order to keep from damaging the eye sockets, they've got to go in through the rectum. Ain't no man going to take that route with me! "
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Around Christmastime 2011, I developed paroxysmal non-nodal reentrant supraventricular tachycardia, likely stemming from my maternal grandmother's history of similar cardiac problems, and underwent radiofrequency catheter ablation of the bad conducting circuit in my atrial tissue. I'm left with no fast pacing circuit to increase my heart rate on demand when I'm exercising. I know people with implanted pacer/defibrillators, and I work as medical transcriptionist and have typed a zillion of those procedures, and the things they despise about it is the problems with tissue pocket infections and interval battery replacements, requiring the site to be reopened, the equipment removed and replaced, antibiotic washout, reclosure, etc. I'll be bugging my doc at next visit to research it and determine if I can get one of these.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is the inability to understand the exponential function."
Nobody wants to die, but now that society is picking up the endless tab for life-extending medicine on people who typically are outside the years in which they're productive members, surely some decisions need to be made.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Shit. Under a local anesthetic?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If the pacemaker is in the heart, and it somehow got loose (maybe because of an imperfect installation), that could lead very quickly to a dead patient. Maybe they've tested for this, but the article doesn't say.
If medical science allows people to live forever, how are we going to know who is the genetic master race. Ohh yea that's right, The blacks and jews will gang up on the white people so they feel inferiour and do not reproduce.
Tell me when science invents a way to get off the planet. That will be a real breakthrough.
"surgeons sliced open their patients' shoulders and inserted the pulse-generating devices in the flesh near the heart, then attached tiny wires to the heart muscle
I'm more comfortable thinking about surgery where my shoulders are opened than thinking about something snaking up through my blood vessels from my leg. Though if I was to choose, the benefits would probably overcome my reservations.
being able to knock a girl out is more important.
The things we can do now adays in medicine are shocking...
The article claims the thing can last "up to 13 years" before having to be replaced.
In the past, we used Pu-238 RTGs called "Plutonium cells", and the pacemakers never had to be replaced.
I guess this step backwards, towards treating pacemakers as a treatment, rather than a cure, guarantees a recurring revenue stream. One wonders, given the industry that surrounds it, whether we will ever get a cure for anything that started out with just a treatment, such as diabetes, when there's so much money tied up in "recurring revenue streams" and so little in "pay for it once". The whole SAS field itself is based on it.
A AAA battery will fit in one's femoral artery?
I wouldn't want something implanted in my arterial system ready to shower clots in me. We don't put pacemaker leads in the arterial system, we put the leads through the venous system. Even a BiV pacer stunning the left ventricle does so through the venous coronary sinus.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
CT surgeons: We're the only specialists who should be allowed to do something like this argle bargle!
Interventional radiologists: Score!
The video clearly shows it's venous access. I don't imagine you're want to be screwing a metal object into an active LV.
You would remove the old one before placing a new one, and can be removed percutaneously, same as it is put in.
Can't wait to start working on this.