New heart pump extends life of heart failure patients

An estimated 150,000 Americans have advanced heart failure.
And when standard medical therapy is no longer effective, and a near-term heart transplant is not available, implantable heart pumps often are the only other option for patients.

Results of a comparative clinical study, presented by a Duke cardiologist at the American Heart Associations Scientific Sessions in November 2009, indicate that a new kind of heart pump—a continuous flow pump-- shows significant improvement in survival for heart failure patients, when compared to the more commonly used pulsatile flow heart pump.

The study findings show that after two years, significantly more patients with the new device survived free of stroke or another operation to replace the device, compared to patients with the older devicea four-fold improvement.

Dr. Joe Rogers, Duke cardiologist said The group of patients we studied werent even candidates for transplantation for some reason or another, so they were left a very little hope that they would have an improvement either in their survival or their quality of life. And we were able to demonstrate in this very sick population that we can improve both.

200 patients in the study all of whom had advanced heart failure- received either the new Heartmate II pump, or the standard pumping, pulsatile flow device. After one year, nearly 70 percent of patients on the new continuous flow pump survived, compared to 55 percent in the pulsatile flow group.

One of the Achilles heels of the older pumps was that they would tend to break, fairly reliably, somewhere within 12 or 18 months of implantation, and were not seeing that same kind of malfunction rate or breakage rate with the new device.

Doctors now hope to explore the new pumps use in patients who have less severe heart failure. The new pump is currently undergoing review for more widespread clinical use.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Duke
• Medicine
• medical
• center
• heart
• failure
• program
• Joe
• Rogers
• Heartmate
• II
• LVAD
• pump

[danthemanzizle]

its funny all we had to to to greatly improve heart replacement viability was stop imitating what's was there before and opt for something more akin to the pump in your fish tank.... and its amazing that no complications have been observed in other body systems as we have had pulses since before we were human..