Hasta La Gadget!

This artificial heart pumps blood continuously using propeller screws. Photo Texas Heart Institute

55 year old Craig Lewis lived for a month without a heartbeat or a pulse. If you had listened to his chest, you would heard silence. If you had hooked him up to an electrocardiograph, you wouldn’t have heard the familiar beep, beep, beep. You would have seen a flat line.

Lewis heart was replaced with a pair of pulseless pumps. Cobbled together from existing ventricular-assist implants and “a moderate amount of homemade stuff,” by Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Bud Frazier of the Texas Heart Institute, the artificial heart continuously pumps blood using screw-shaped propellers. Hence, constant blood flow without a beat.

Cohn says that the beat is there only because that’s the way the heart works. When they swapped it out for their contraption, “none of the other organs seem[ed] to care much,” he told NPR.

Unfortunately Lewis died a month later due to his disease, but there is another artificial, pulseless heart in action. Abigail is a calf with one of Cohn and Frazier’s hearts, and she is doing fine.

Cohn sees this heart as the future. He likens artificial pulsing hearts to flying machines with flapping wings — mimicking nature is not always the best solution for a machine.

With its single moving part, Cohn and Frazier’s device certainly seems to make a lot of sense. The only problem might be social. After all, without a pulse or a heartbeat, how do you tell if somebody is alive or dead?

Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life [NPR via the Giz]

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