Refurbished heart pacemakers work like new

CHICAGO — One person’s used pacemaker is the other person’s treasure.

A program to refurbish used pacemakers may enlarge access to the lifesaving devices. In a clinical trial of nearly 300 people, patients who received refurbished pacemakers fared simply to boot to those who received new ones, scientists reported November 17 at the annual American Heart Association meeting.

The work may make pacemakers reachable to those who may now now not otherwise come up with the money for them, cardiac electrophysiologist Thomas Crawford said in a news briefing. The hope, he said, is to scale up the team’s operation and “deliver pacemakers to patients in low- and middle-income countries without charge.”

Doctors use pacemakers to treat individuals with abnormal heartbeats (SN: Four/23/23) The tiny, battery-powered devices are in most cases implanted within the chest, with wires that thread through a vein and touch the heart. Electrical signals traveling down the wires kick the heart right into a gradual rhythm.

“We insert thousands and thousands of devices each year,” said Miguel Leal, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta who change into now now not involved with the work. Alternatively the devices are now now not equally reachable to patients. Every year within america, nearly 800 people per million receive pacemakers. In some countries, that number drops to the only digits.

Crawford sees two potential solutions. The first is designing low-cost pacemakers with basic functions. The 2nd is what his team at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor is trying: reusing old devices.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved pacemakers as single use devices. But today’s pacemakers can chug along for 15 years, occasionally outlasting their original owners. One such example inspired Crawford’s work: a patient who died two months after her pacemaker change into implanted. Her husband later brought the device back to her doctors and said, “Are you in a position to employ this in a person else?”

“That change right into a really eye-opening statement,” Crawford said. It resulted in his team’s program, in general known as My Heart Your Heart, which collects pacemakers from those who have died or have had them removed. The team cleans and tests the devices after which donates them to patients in need.

Contained within the study, Crawford’s team implanted either a brand new or refurbished pacemaker in participants in Venezuela, Nigeria, Paraguay, Kenya, Mozambique and Mexico after which tracked outcomes for ninety days. Results from individuals with either sort of device looked nearly identical, the researchers found. Infection rates (a customary risk when implanting devices into the body) were similar in both groups ­­­— around 2 percent — and the team didn’t examine any device malfunctions. Three individuals with refurbished devices died over the time period studied, though not among the deaths were related to pacemaker malfunction, Crawford said.

Crawford estimates that refurbishing a pacemaker costs around $50 to $One hundred. That’s when put next with roughly $6,000 for a brand new one within america, and around $2,000 within the Global South, he said.

It is extremely important follow up with participants to seem if the refurbished devices continue to perform well, Leal said. But in a time when it would o.k. be demanding to advertise equitable access to clinic therapy, he said, Crawford’s work “is an out of this world example of walking the walk and now now not just talking the controversy.”