The Dead Walk Among Us

"It is alive!"

I found out recently there is a guy in the next district over who is living without a pulse.

Here's how:

An artificial heart has been developed that involves the use of centrifugal pumps instead of relying on a pulsatile form of pumping. This results in a constant blood flow instead of the high and low pressures of a heartbeat.

If you listened to the patient's chest with a stethoscope, you wouldn't hear a heartbeat. If you examined the arteries, there's no pulse. If you hooked him up to an EKG, he'd be flat-lined. It's the strangest thing.

(Edited from the article):

The doctors who created the pump did not start totally from scratch. They took two medical implants known as ventricular assist devices and hooked them together. A ventricular assist device has a screwlike rotor of blades, which pushes the blood forward in a continuous flow. Thousands of people have these implanted in their hearts. By using two, the doctors replaced both the right and left ventricles — the entire heart.

The doctors say the continuous-flow pump should last longer than other artificial hearts and cause fewer problems. That's because each side has just one moving part: the constantly whirling rotor. But Cohn says they will still have to convince the world that you don't need a pulse to live because by every metric we have to analyze patients, they're not living.

"We look at all the animals, insects, fish, reptiles and certainly all mammals, and see a pulsatile circulation," he says. "And so all the early research and all the early efforts were directed at making pulsatile pumps."

However, the only reason blood must be pumped rhythmically instead of continuously is the heart tissue itself.

"The pulsatility of the flow is essential for the heart, because it can only get nourishment in between heartbeats," Cohn says. "If you remove that from the system, none of the other organs seem to care much."

The only thing I'm wondering is what we're going to do if the thing stops working. CPR won't do anything for him, he has no heart. Neither will any of the medications we use as most of them are designed to work on the heart itself. Maybe it's got a hand crank or something.

The times they are a-changing.