Heart

AliveCor’s smartphone Heart Monitor has received FDA approval and will go on sale to healthcare professionals in the United States in January 2013. The AliveCor Heart Monitor allows the recording, display, storing, transferring, and evaluation of single-channel electrocardiogram (ECG) rhythms using an iPhone 4 or 4S.  Read More

While regular pacemakers attempt to rectify arrhythmias (irregular heart beat rhythms) using constantly-delivered electric pulses, implantable cardioverter defibrillators do something a bit different. As long as everything stays normal, they don’t do any shocking – when they detect a dangerously fast heart beat, however, they respond by delivering a massive jolt of electricity to the heart. While this may save the patient’s life, it’s also very traumatic and painful. Now, a team of scientists from Washington University in St. Louis may have come up with a solution to that problem.  Read More

Implantable medical devices are becoming more common everyday. The problem is that no matter how sophisticated the devices are, most still depend on batteries for power. One solution to this is for the power source to remain outside the body and to beam the power to the device. However, that has its own difficulties because wireless power can’t penetrate very far through human tissue ... until now.  Read More

People being monitored for heart conditions currently have to go into a hospital or clinic on a regular basis, to have an electrocardiogram performed on them. That may be about to change, however, as researchers from Spain’s Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya have developed a bathroom scale that performs the procedure right in the user’s home.  Read More

Roughly two and a half million Americans suffer a heart attack or a stroke each year. About 20% of these - half a million people - die in the aftermath. The proximate cause for both heart attack and stroke is a blood clot in the wrong place - a blood clot that could be prevented or minimized by anti-clot therapy IF physicians knew that an attack or stroke was expected shortly. New findings from a research study led by Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) has identified a new blood test which has the promise of predicting heart attack or stroke weeks prior to their occurrence.  Read More

A heart-powered pacemaker may sound counter-intuitive, but in essence this is precisely what aerospace engineers from the University of Michigan are proposing. The engineers have come up with a prototype powered by vibrations in the chest cavity - vibrations which are caused mainly by the beating of the heart.  Read More

Although people do regularly recover from heart attacks, the heart itself never entirely “gets better.” This is because cardiac muscle tissue doesn’t regenerate – any that dies in the event of a heart attack will only be replaced with inactive scar tissue, and the heart’s performance will be permanently compromised as a result. Scientists have responded by trying to develop heart patches made of materials that act as nanoscale scaffolds, upon which new cardiomyocytes (heart cells) can grow. Materials used for these scaffolds have included fibrin, nanofiber, gold nanowires and polymer. Now, new research is suggesting that silkworm silk may be a better choice than any of those.  Read More

Around the world, scientists have been working on ways of replacing the heart tissue that dies when a heart attack occurs. These efforts have resulted in heart "patches" that are made from actual cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells), or that encourage surrounding heart cells to grow into them. One problem with some such patches, however, lies in the fact that that they consist of cardiomyocytes set within a scaffolding of poorly-conductive materials. This means that they are insulated from the electrical signals sent out by the heart, so they don't expand and contract as the heart beats. Scientists at MIT, however, may be on the way to a solution.  Read More

Working their way towards energy-efficient pacemakers that use light pulses to control the beating of the heart, scientists at New York's Stony Brook University recently developed optogenetic heart tissue – it contracts when exposed to light. More specifically, they took donor cells that had been modified to respond to light, and coupled them to conventional heart cells. A team from California’s Stanford University, however, has now created actual optogenetic heart cells.  Read More