As February is National Heart month in the UK, MPN’s Emily Hughes takes look at some of the ways plastics help with the treatment of heart disease
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) kills someone in the UK every three minutes and accounts for more than a quarter of all deaths in the UK, according to the Heart Research Institute. This figure does not include other deaths that are linked or a direct cause of heart illnesses and conditions.
Over the last 12 months there has been a considerable amount of devices and innovations in the medical plastics world that have been designed to help patients suffering with heart related conditions live longer, healthier lives.
Where a heart condition can be fixed via surgical procedure, Stratasys’ 3Dprinting technology has been proven to help. Recently the company provided surgeons at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital with an anatomically correct 3D printed model of a little girl’s heart.
This 3D model helped surgeons to determine what was wrong with the heart and enabled them to plan the operation to treat her life-threatening condition.
Pacemakers have been helping patients with irregular heartbeats for decades. In 1958, the first device managed to last for a not-so-staggering three hours before it stopped. Since then pacemakers have come a long way, helping millions of patients with heart issues across the globe.
Micra pacemaker by Medtronic
Traditional pacemakers sit just under the skin on a patient’s collarbone and are connected to the heart through a vein. However, last year, Medtronic took the next step in pacemaker development with Micra.
The tiny Micra is slipped on a catheter through the femoral artery and docked, in its entirety, inside the right ventricle of the heart. It then operates wholly inside the heart without electrical wires that can break or become infected.
Another rather amazing little device that sits inside the heart is Cardiosolutions’ Mitra-Spacer. The device is a tethered atraumatic inflatable and volume adjustable balloon that is placed between two valve leaflets on a heart.
It is intended to treat or bridge heart failure patients whose operative mortality risk for undergoing conventional open-heart surgery is deemed too high and was recently used for the first time to save a patient who had suffered severe heart failure.
In addition to the Mitra-Spacer, patients with heart failure can also turn to SynCardia Systems’ Total Artificial Heart (TAH-t). This device helps heart failure patients to bridge the gap between their own heart failure and a heart transplant by assuming the full function of a failed human heart.
SynCardia Systems’ Total Artificial Heart (TAH-t) device
THA-t replaces the dying heart’s two ventricles as well as its four heart valves and in a study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 79% of patients who were implanted with the TAH-t device lived from the point that their heart failed to when they were able to have a heart transplant. This is the highest bridge-to-transplant rate publically reported for any mechanical circulatory support device.
If however a patient is past the point of these devices being of help then they can rely on TransMedic's Organ Care System (OCS), dubbed as the ‘heart-in-a-box’.
Heart-in-a-box
This transports hearts for transplant, however, unlike traditional transportation devices, OCS fills the heart with warm oxygenated blood, which optimises the condition of the organ by replenishing oxygen, nutrients, and hormones that would otherwise become depleted and provides continuous monitoring and assessment of the organ until the point of transplantation.
The OCS device by TransMedic has also opened the door for deceased circulatory death (DCD) donors, a previously unsuitable source of donors, to be used.