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Tag: heart

09.20.2013

gross and interesting news

Part of a 2 ft long blood clot

A team of doctors a UCLA vacuumed a 2 foot long blood clot out of a patient’s heart. The clot extended from his leg to the entry of his heart. The doctors used a machine called AngioVac to perform the procedure. According to the UCLA press release here’s how it worked:

A team of UCLA interventional radiologists and cardiovascular surgeons slid a tiny camera down Dunlap’s esophagus to visually monitor his heart. Next, they guided a coiled hose through his neck artery and plugged one end into his heart, against the clot. They threaded the other end through a vein at the groin and hooked the hose up to a powerful heart-bypass device in the operating room to create suction.
“Once in place, the AngioVac quickly sucked the deadly clot out of Mr. Dunlap’s heart and filtered out the solid tissue,” said Moriarty, a UCLA interventional radiologist with expertise in clot removal and cardiovascular imaging. “The system then restored the cleansed blood through a blood vessel near the groin, eliminating the need for a blood transfusion.”
The procedure lasted three hours. Doctors observed Dunlap for three days in intensive care before transferring him to the hospital’s cardiac ward and then discharging him four days later.

The procedure is an faster and less invasive alternative to open heart surgery.

 

 

07.09.2013

singers’ heart rates are in sync

A study published in Frontiers in Psychology, details how the heart rates of choral singers synch up during a performance. As explained by Scicurious at Scientific American:

How exactly is this supposed to work? Well, when you think of singing, don’t just think of the tempo of the music, think also of what singing entails. It’s not like playing the piano, it involves really controlling your breathing as well as the notes you are singing. Anyone with choir experience (or experience playing wind instrument like the clarinet or trumpet) will tell you that you have to learn to write in “breathmarks”, places in the music where you can breathe. When singing, these are often pretty regular, but also a little bit (or sometimes a good bit) further apart than natural breathing.

If you are controlling your breathing in this way, it means that your breathing can begin to exert control over your heartrate. Heart rate and breathing can affect each other, and so the slow, regular breathing with slow paced singing can change the heart rate variability.

Note, this is heart rate VARIABILITY, not just heart rate. Your heart rate is much more variable than most people think. Every time you exhale, for example, activation of the vagus nerve causes your heart rate to slow down a very little bit. When you inhale, this braking action is released and the heart rate speeds up again. The fluctuation here is heart rate variability, and it’s constantly changing.

But if heart rate variability is controlled to some extent by the rate of your inhaling and exhaling, and if singing involves everyone inhaling and exhaling together…then group singing could affect group heart rate variability.

11.05.2012

bypass surgery may be better than stents

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine finds evidence that bypass surgery might be better than stents for treating blockages in diabetic patients. From Science News:

To find the best treatment for these patients, Fuster and colleagues randomly assigned 1,900 people with diabetes who had blockages in more than one coronary branch to get either bypass surgery or stents. After five years, 26.6 percent of patients assigned to get stents had suffered a heart attack or a stroke, or had died. Only 18.7 percent of those getting bypass surgery met one of those fates. And although both groups also received the best medical care otherwise available, those getting stents were more than twice as likely to have to return to a hospital to fix repeat blockages, says Fuster, who presented the study results at a meeting of the American Heart Association on November 4. The report also appeared online the same day in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“I think the data are very convincing,” says Timothy Gardner, a heart surgeon at Christiana Hospital in Newark, Del., who wasn’t part of the study team. “Interventional cardiologists have been skeptical that the more invasive coronary artery bypass graft in patients — especially with the other morbidities such as diabetes — was worth it.”