NEW HIGH-TECH HEART TREATMENTS & SAVERS

With heart disease affecting an estimated 27 million adults and more than 8 percent of U.S.A. population alone, researches are racing to develop new treatments.

Here, among the most promising: 1. HEART REGENERATION - During most heart attacks, a blood clot forms and blocks one of the coronary arteries and feed the heart. This kills part of the muscle, turning it into scar tissue, which often leads to shortness of breath, weakness and reduced ability to exercise. Today researchers at Cedars-Sinai Institute in Los Angeles are using are using a patient's stem cells to transform scar tissue into living heart muscle. The idea is simple: harvest stem cells from an unaffected part of the heart, multiply them in the laboratory and inject them into the site of the injury, so they can take root and repair the damage. Isn't this great? They have done some tests recently here in the United States and the results are just striking. If studies continue to show such impressive results, heart patients will benefit from the procedure within four to five years, say the researchers at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. In addition, they are also testing similar procedures using stem cells from donors, which have worked well in animals. They plan to test donor cells trials in 270 patients by mid-2014, and if the results end p promising, donor cell treatment shall be widely available in 10 years.

2. BEATING HEART TRANSPLANTS - When a donor heart is ready for transplant, the heart is typically packed in a picnic cooler with a bag of cold saline solution. Cheap and easy process, however very inefficient, since donor hearts begin to deteriorate the moment they are removed from the person's chest. So an organization in New Jersey, "The Medicines Co." pushed to make the beating-heart a reality. Here is how it works: A miniature heart-lung machine circulates donor blood through he heart until moments it is stitched into a recipient's chest. Besides, recovery time is very fast too. If the clinical trials continue to show impressive results, the technology could be approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and widely available by 2014. 3. MINIMALLY INVASIVE VALVE REPLACEMENT - Heart valves like joint break down and more often than yo think, because of wear and tear. And every year in the USA alone about 50,000 patients undergo complex open-heart surgery to receive new valves. Recently, researchers at Stanford University have developed a procedure to replace ailing valves, without cutting open a patient's chest.

The procedure is called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, uses a catheter to guide the artificial valve to the beating heart through a small incision in the leg or between the ribs. This procedure is far less traumatic than open-heart surgery, especially for patients who are inoperable or high risk. 4. A BEATLESS HEART - Each year up to 40,000 patients in the USA alone would benefit froma heart transplant, yet only about 2,200 donor hearts are available. So the beatless heart transplant would be a great and safer alternative. Artificial hearts are a time-tested alternative and have bene available since 1982, however they require the use of an external air compressor and patients need maintenance surgeries. Recently, a team from Houston, Texas, have introduced a new device, called a beatless heart, that pushes blood through the body at a steady rate. The beatless heart has no valves, flexible components or complex machinery; however it acts less like a heart than a pair of turbines, says the inventor William Cohn, M.D. The beatless heart has only two moving parts floating in magnetic fields, spinning rapidly, so it does not burn out as fast as an artificial heart with multiple parts. Plans are underway to test humans, and if results are promising, the research team will seek FDA approval in a couple of years from now. Source: AARP Magazine (February/March 2013)