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Artificial hearts like this one – and other exciting breakthroughs – mean new hope for America's millions of heart patients."

Sadly, cardiovascular disease will still claim almost 1 million lives in the United States this year. But if the scientific results reported in recent months are a harbinger, we can expect at least a slowing in the total heart-disease toll ahead.



Some remarkable recent advances include:

• Injecting a patient's own muscle cells to strengthen a weakened heart
• Improving angioplasty success rates by coating mesh stents with drugs
• Employing "sutureless surgery" to speed up coronary-artery bypass procedures
• Preventing life-threatening irregular heartbeats in bypass-surgery patients
• Relieving debilitating angina chest pain with a new class of drugs

"Futuristic" Surgical Innovations
Artificial Heart: The first recipient of a fully self-contained artificial heart, 59-year-old Robert Tools of Franklin, Ky., was near death when he received the device on July 2, 2001. Mr. Tools lived for five months before dying of internal bleeding and organ failure. He was even able to leave the hospital on one occasion.
The new heart – which consists of a two-pound pump, an electronics package to adjust its beat to the recipient's body, and rechargeable lithium batteries – holds great promise. A reliable artificial heart could benefit 60,000 to 100,000 people a year in the United States alone.

Meanwhile, medical scientists and engineers have produced a number of mechanical devices to assist ailing hearts and help prolong life. These pumps, called left-ventricular assist devices (LVADs), ease the heart's workload but do not totally take over its job of circulating blood through the body. Primarily, these mechanical devices have kept people alive as they waited for a heart transplant.
Survival Rate Tripled An exciting new study, however, has shown that one of these LVADs can significantly extend life and improve its quality for patients who are too old or too sick to undergo a heart transplant. The trial, carried out at nearly two dozen U.S. medical centers, followed two groups of patients with congestive heart failure. One group received the LVAD, which was implanted next to the heart and powered by wearable batteries that allowed the patient to move about freely. The other group was treated with the best medical therapy for their disease, which included drugs, diet and exercise.
At the end of one year, the survival rate for the LVAD patients was more than double that of those treated medically, 52 percent versus 25 percent. After two years, the survival rate for the LVAD patients was nearly triple that of the medically treated group – 23 percent compared to 8 percent, which suggests an even greater survival advantage might exist at three years.
In a smaller, ongoing study of another LVAD, 56 percent of patients with severe congestive heart failure have survived an average of 7.9 months. Their heart-failure symptoms have stabilized and the contraction of their heart muscle has improved. Researchers have concluded that the LVAD may enable complete rehabilitation of some heart-failure patients and allow them to resume full, active lives.
Sutureless Surgery Two other new advances may enable surgeons to all but abandon the use of heart – lung machines during coronary-artery bypass surgery and make surgery faster, easier, more reliable, and advance the use of robotic surgery. These sutureless-surgery techniques enable surgeons to make simpler, quicker, more exact connections of blood vessels than the traditional way of hand-sewing them into place.
During conventional bypass operations, a patient's heart may be stopped and a heart-lung machine used to divert blood around the heart, supply it with oxygen, and keep it circulating through the rest of the body. This allows a surgeon to sew one or more grafts into place to carry blood around an obstructed artery. But a lack of blood, even for a short time, can damage a heart.

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