They say that there will be a nylon heart…
A patient with a heavy heart is on the mend
Alexander Berezin, CompulentaSouth African surgeons were the first to learn how to transplant someone else's heart to a person, and it was in the 1960s.
Alas, our body is very sensitive to attempts to manipulate its internal organs: it quickly notices a "fake" and triggers an immune response, in fact, rejecting someone else's heart. You can fight this – and sometimes patients with such an organ live for ten years; one even lasted thirty, and managed to die from skin cancer. However, if the patient is severely weakened (and the cores are rarely in good health), then rejection puts a person on the verge of life and death.
A radical solution to the problem would be a completely mechanical heart. But it has many disadvantages. Firstly, the designers of the human heart and current mechanical systems operate with a different material science base. The device of the necessary power, created by our hands, weighs up to several kilograms, while a normal heart is only 300 grams. In addition, in the mechanical analogue, under some circumstances, "congestion" (clotting) may occur, and because of this, patients often have to take medications to thin the blood, and with them any cut leads to profuse bleeding.
The new device, created by the French firm CARMAT, seems to have managed to advance in miniaturization, approaching a natural organ: it weighs only 900 g, which is only three times heavier than an ordinary heart. Well, thanks to the improved design, according to the developers, the risk of blood clotting is minimized.
Actually, the replacement of a diseased heart with an artificial one was carried out on December 18, 2013 at the Georges Pompidou Hospital in Paris by a team of cardiac surgeons led by Alain Carpentier. The patient, whose condition was assessed as exceptionally severe, and the prognosis gave him no more than a month of life, already feels fine. Further amendment should be facilitated by "a number of innovative features of the artificial heart", in particular its "real autonomy".
The previous artificial hearts of the American AbioCor type had only one pump, that is, they could replace only one atrium and one ventricle of the heart, while you and I have twice as many of both. In such conditions, it is, alas, impossible to talk about a full-fledged large and small circle of blood circulation. Any physical activity, including normal walking, was accompanied by the need for manual correction of blood flow intensity, which usually had to be performed with the help of a specialist.
The new heart has a whole set of built-in sensors that characterize the parameters of blood flow in real time and, in case of the slightest changes, instantly respond to them by increasing or decreasing blood flow. Consequently, manual adjustment, which is often difficult or simply unrealistic, has disappeared by itself, and the speed of reaction to the requests of the body will increase. Since the CARMAT heart contains two pumps at once, it provides both small and large circulatory circles, again completely repeating the functionality of an ordinary heart.
If all goes well, soon the heart of CARMAT
three more French patients will be transplanted (AP photo).
The only bad thing is that one of the main limitations of the artificial heart – the lack of a compact energy source – has so far only a partial solution. The patient must constantly wear a belt made of lithium batteries weighing more than one kilogram and needing to be recharged at least once a day (or even more often). Perhaps recent progress in the field of energy storage will reduce this burden as well...
Nevertheless, doctors are not talking about the revolution for nothing. Finally, a person with an artificial heart has come close to an individual with an ordinary heart in mobility, and the danger of blood clotting in the bloodstream is minimized, which eliminates the need for the introduction of drugs that dilute it.
Taking into account the fact that only in France 32 thousand people die every year without waiting for a donor heart, the device, even despite the estimated cost of 80 thousand euros, becomes a real hope for many patients with serious problems of the cardiovascular system.
Prepared based on the materials of CARMAT.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru24.12.2013