Artificial hearts were first developed in the 20th century, but they haven’t been practical devices for long-term implantation until just recently. Here’s a story about the first implantation of a promising new type of artificial heart that lacks the pulsation of a real heart: http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_436300.html
This article from 2006 describes some more details of the technology: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/17523/
It seems that by doing away with the pulse, this artificial heart is able to be significantly simpler, smaller, and more robust than presently approved models. Instead of lasting for about 2 years, it can last for 10. Instead of being too large to fit into most women, it’s small enough to fit in virtually anyone. However, there are worries that the lack of a pulse could cause unforeseen issues in patients…I suppose we’ll see soon enough. Also, when I mentioned it to Matthew, he pointed out that in a disaster a first-responder might classify someone with such a heart as dead due to the lack of pulse.
In any case though, it’s good to see such progress in the development of artificial hearts. An artificial heart that is as good as a real heart would be a real lifesaver. According to the Wikipedia article on heart transplants, there’s need for about 800,000 heart transplants each year, but only about 3,500 that can actually go through each year due to an extreme shortage of donor hearts. Effective artificial hearts could save several million lives in a decade. It might even be able to save more lives than that, as it would be a much easier decision to implant, leading to more cases being considered for implantation, including lost causes and as a preventative measure in less developed cases. It might even be possible to keep such hearts on hand for emergencies, unlike transplants, though transplanting them in an emergency could be difficult. It might also be possible to do detection (or even control) within the artificial heart, so that subtle signs of trouble could be detected by the heart and the patient warned before a catastrophic event, so the patient can get to a hospital and the problem resolved before the heart fails. One last possibility is that a sufficiently small heart transplant could lead to the implantation of redundant hearts, so that a single failure would not necessarily be disastrous.
All of this could lead to longer lives, which is a good thing.
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