Saturday, September 24, 2005
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
CHICAGO -- Earlier this summer Robert Imhausen won one horseshoe tournament and placed second in another -- not bad for a 67-year-old guy whose doctor told him last fall he would be dead in six months.
Imhausen survives with the aid of an experimental device implanted in his body to help his heart pump blood to his organs. He is one of dozens of heart failure patients whose life has been extended by some version of an artificial heart.
Surgeons have been experimenting with artificial hearts for nearly 50 years, and despite many failures and a few successes, they continue to pursue developing a device to assist or even replace a failing heart and provide the patient with years of a life worth living.
An estimated 4.8 million Americans have congestive heart failure, with some 400,000 new cases diagnosed annually. Each year heart failure is directly responsible for 42,000 deaths and is related to the cause of death in an additional 219,000 cases, a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
Aggressive technology
Artificial hearts and left ventricular assist devices, or LVADs, represent cardiology's most aggressive technology, sometimes serving as a bridge to a heart transplant, but often seeking to help patients for whom no transplantable heart is available.
Artificial hearts and LVADs replace or bolster failing heart muscle. That is more ambitious than implanted pacemakers and defibrillators, which use technology to correct faulty heartbeats.
Yet even though pacemakers and defibrillators have been approved for widespread use for years, their makers still encounter difficulties and must recall the devices at great expense.
So why do physicians persist in pursuing the more difficult, riskier technology of artificial hearts?
"The reason we all keep after the problem is that the patient has no alternative. Just death," said Dr. Valluvan Jeevanandam, the University of Chicago heart surgeon who implanted the pump that helps keep Imhausen's blood flowing.