Heart Patient Making ‘Remarkable’ Gains
The first human recipient of a completely internal artificial heart is doing “remarkably well” one month later, his doctor said Wednesday in Louisville, Ky.
The unidentified diabetic, in his mid-to-late 50s, is now walking and talking and growing stronger by the day, said Dr. Robert Dowling, one of the surgeons who implanted the device in the patient at Louisville’s Jewish Hospital.
“His gains in the last five to seven days have been phenomenal,” said Dowling, a surgeon at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. “He can now walk great lengths without assistance. The device is working flawlessly.”
The patient’s liver and kidney functions have also improved, Dowling said, and the tracheotomy tube placed in him two weeks ago could be removed in the next few weeks. The tube, which is inserted to aid breathing, has allowed the patient to be off a ventilator for the last week, Dowling added at a briefing on the patient’s condition.
“When I first met him, he didn’t have the strength to lift his head. He was malnourished and weak as a kitten,” Dowling said. “He was facing death 30 days ago, and he knew it.”
The AbioCor heart, manufactured by a Massachusetts company, Abiomed Inc., weighs 2 pounds and is made of titanium and plastic. It includes two ventricular chambers with corresponding valves and a motor that circulates blood throughout the body. An internal battery is also implanted and can be recharged by an external battery pack carried by the patient.
This artificial heart is far less cumbersome than earlier models such as the Jarvik-7 that was implanted in a few patients in the 1980s. In this heart, there are no protruding wires or tubes.
Unlike a transplanted human heart, the AbioCor heart cannot be rejected by the body, said Dr. Jon Kobashigawa, medical director of the UCLA heart transplant program. With transplanted hearts, rejection accounts for the most deaths within a year, he said.
Also, patients who have heart transplants have to take anti-rejection medication that can cause side effects such as high blood pressure, kidney failure and weight gain, he said. Artificial hearts do not require anti-rejection medication.
The patient, who at the time of surgery had a 9% chance of surviving a month, is now watching videotapes and listening to jazz CDs, Dowling said. However, he said there is still a long way to go before the patient can eat without a feeding tube and walk around for long periods of time without help. In addition, the patient still suffers from gastritis, an inflammation of the stomach lining, and needs blood thinners for some stomach bleeding, he said.
“We can’t say this is going to be a long-term success,” Dowling acknowledged. “[But] the first 30 days have been an overwhelming success.”
Jewish Hospital plans to perform the operation again soon. The medical team will start recruiting patients for the procedure in the next month or so, said Dowling.
UCLA Medical Center is also one of a handful of hospitals given the go-ahead by the Food and Drug Administration to implant the AbioCor heart. The first operation at UCLA should be within two months, said Dr. Daniel Marelli, one of the investigators in the UCLA artificial heart program.
Meanwhile, the Louisville patient is providing inspiration for medical teams who were chosen to perform the surgery. At a conference in Boston last Saturday that brought together medical teams to evaluate the operation procedures, the patient appeared briefly via videoconference. The Boston attendees could not hear him speak because his voice was still weak, said Dowling, so he wrote his message to them instead: “Life is wonderful.”
