Common thinking: you hear a heartbeat, someone’s alive. Most women, like me, will never forget going to hear the heartbeat for the first time when they’re pregnant, and just hearing silence. But doctors have found, according to a story by Mike Wehner at Tecca, that you don’t actually need a heartbeat to keep you alive.
That is, if you have an artificial heart. New artificial heart technology continuously “circulates blood flow, but leaves out the familiar thump,” Wehner writes.
Heartbeats are not always necessary. “You simply need some means of keeping your blood flowing,” according to Wehner. Doctors Bud Frazier and Billy Cohn demonstrated this when they created their new, continuous-flow artificial heart, Wehner writes. “Using two turbines to replace the muscle of the heart, the new hardware keeps blood moving without actually mimicking the heart's pumping rhythm,” the story explains.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in this country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization reports that 17.3 million people worldwide died of CVD in 2008 and by 2030, 23.6 million people will have died in that one year.
So far, 50 young cows and three humans – one given just 12 hours to live before the doctors started on him – have received the turbine heart, according to Wehner. The first human patient, Craig Lewis, was suffering from not one but many diseases, when he became the first-ever person given the beat-less human heart. Wehner reports that, though the man died within five weeks given his other medical problems, within 48 hours of the surgery, Lewis was able to sit up and speak normally.
Wehner writes that this remarkable new technology is giving new hope to patients with terminal heart disease, adding that “the doctors themselves see their invention as a step towards the goal of creating the perfect artificial heart.” In an interview with Popular Science, Wehner reports that Cohn said, "I think we're on the verge, right now, of solving the artificial-heart problem for good. All we had to do was get rid of the pulse."
Edited by
Rich Steeves
