New Device Could Be Heart Failure Breakthrough
Published: June 11, 2005
Congestive heart failure sends more people to the hospital than all forms of cancer combined. Doctors need new treatment options because drugs and current heart devices don’t help more than one-third of these patients.
Now, for only the tenth time in the United States, doctors have implanted a new device that they hope will put the squeeze on heart failure.
David Gantt spends his free time reading about the Civil War, but over the last few years, he’s waged a war of his own against heart disease.
“I was in and out of the hospital with these heart failures. The emergency squad knew this address fairly well,” Gantt said.
Gantt has congestive heart failure, which means his heart has trouble pumping and tries to compensate by getting bigger. Doctors are constantly looking for new treatments, and they may have caught onto something with an elastic net that works like a girdle.
“This cardiac support device, a sort of wrap around the heart, helps to limit that enlargement and may in fact even reverse it,” said Dr. William Abraham, of Ohio State University’s Ross Heart Hospital.
Abraham said the net’s gentle support could help patients feel better and remain active. Dr. Benjamin Sun recently implanted the net around Gantt’s heart, making him the tenth person in the country to receive it.
Unlike older options that required open-chest surgery, this device is inserted through a small cut between the ribs with the help of an X-ray camera.
“We can see that it sits well, is positioned appropriately, and indeed if there are little wrinkles in it, we can see it and we are able to flatten them out so that it lies really perfectly in him,” Sun said.
If the net proves successful in these clinical trials, it could someday help hundreds of thousands of heart failure patients like Gantt live longer and feel stronger in their battle against heart disease.
Ohio State’s Ross Heart Hospital is one of only five centers so far to test this new device. Researchers plan to ask the Food and Drug Administration for permission to expand this trial so they can also test the effectiveness of the device and seek FDA approval.
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