A new frontier has been reached in the field of medicine. In France, a completely artificial heart was made, an event that gives hope to many patients on transplant lists.
Late last year, a French company called Carmat received approval in Europe for the first complete artificial heart. That is, an organ made of synthetic and biological materials intended for implantation in patients in need of heart transplants. Now, half a year later, the first American patient received one of these hearts.
The first artificial heart transplant was performed on a 39-year-old man
The transplant was performed last week on a 39-year-old man at Duke University Hospital in North Carolina. The man did not arrive at the hospital hoping to have a heart transplant, but the doctors saved his life. After experiencing unexpected heart failure, he was diagnosed with advanced coronary heart disease and was prepared for bypass surgery, a procedure that involves implanting a healthy vessel from another part of the body to redirect blood into the body. around a blocked artery, knots Digi24.
When her condition quickly worsened, the medical team realized that bypass surgery was unnecessary and that a traditional heart transplant had become too risky. The patient was in the right place, because not every transplant center could have implanted an artificial heart.
Carmat received FDA approval last year to conduct a study with this heart on patients in the US with end-stage biventricular heart failure, a condition in which the chambers that pick up and push out blood no longer function properly. Duke is one of three transplant centers in the United States participating in the study, and the surgical team was already involved in implanting the device.
“We removed the left and right ventricles and then placed the artificial heart in its place,” said Dr. Jacob Schröder, an assistant professor in the hospital’s surgery department. He added that the patient was very stable throughout the process.
The “artificial” heart weighs almost a kilogram
The artificial heart has a chamber for the hydraulic fluid and one for the blood, separated by a membrane. The vascularized part of the membrane is made of cow’s heart tissue, as are the four valves of the heart. A motorized pump pushes the hydraulic fluid in and out of the chambers, and that fluid moves the membrane to allow blood to flow.
Built-in sensors automatically adapt blood flow to a person’s needs at any time; if, for example, it moves, blood flow will increase. The Carmat heart is called the “next generation”: what differentiates it from the artificial heart made by the American company SynCardia is the fact that the latter is a fixed rate device, ie the beats per minute remain the same, regardless of the patient’s activity.
The device weighs 900 grams (about three times the weight of the average human heart). External configuration is a bit more difficult; patients will need to carry approximately 4 kilograms of equipment, including a controller, a bag of fluid and two batteries. In the case of the patient at Duke Hospital, the artificial heart will remain remotely connected to the hospital system so that doctors can monitor it.
Just a few days after the American transplant, a similar one took place in Naples, Italy, marking the first commercial sale of the Carmat heart, the difference being that the transplant of this patient was planned. In the future, artificial hearts will be used either as a substitute, while patients wait for a real one, or as a long-term solution.
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