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Defibrillators Help Patients Live Longer, Better

A new study shows that defibrillators - devices designed to detect and correct dangerous heart rhythms - can help people with heart disease live longer, and with a much better quality of life, than they do now. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center found that a small, very simple change in the way physicians set or programmed the device dramatically reduced unnecessary or inappropriate shocks and increased patient survival.

Topics:
Electronics & Computers Implants & Prosthetics Medical Patient Monitoring

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    Transcript

    00:00:02 [Music] heart patients if they have had a heart attack and for other reasons if they have a poor heart function there can be a risk to develop heart arhythmia problems and some of these heart arhythmia problems can be dangerous and may even be life-threatening so if the heart function is weak enough and we are we think that they are at risk for these

    00:00:26 heart arrhythmias we'll implant a defibrillator in them to help protect against Sutton cardiac death Henry Hall a heart disease patient received an implantable defibrillator at the University of Rochester Medical Center in 1995 I had my first heart attack I had the triple bypass surgery but I had heart damage to the level of 30% and he recommended the defibrillator I've had

    00:00:51 it in here almost 2 years and no problems with it what it does is that it actually will monitor that patient's heart rhythm constantly from beat to beat so that if the heart rhythm does go wrong that device will detect it and it'll actually treat it if the heart rhythm doesn't stop by itself and it can treat it by pacing the heart a little faster or it can actually give the heart

    00:01:16 a shock rescuing the patient from those dangerous heart rhythm problems very happy to have the defibrillator knowing that uh uh the risk of complete heart failure uh exists with the level that I have right now the only changes in in my life are affected directly by the reduction in the heart functionality uh things I used to do without any effort at all now I have to

    00:01:44 put a limit to it tennis stacking firewood bringing it up to the house and stuff I can do all that still Dr Arthur Moss a professor of Cardiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center is a world-renowned expert in the treatment and prevention of card cardiac arhythmia and sudden cardiac death he says that defibrillators do have some side effects

    00:02:05 including unnecessary or inappropriate shocks which are delivered for rhythms that aren't dangerous or life-threatening the adverse side effects from the defibrillator even though it's saves lives it can produce Troublesome recurrent shocks or recurrent Rhythm disorders that uh frighten the patient they're it's painful it's

    00:02:28 uncomfortable um they have to go to the doctor to find out whether it was a a real cause or whether it was an inappropriate Affair and sometimes that's even difficult to determine according to a 2008 study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology approximately 20 to 25% of defibrillator therapy is inappropriate Dr Moss along with Dr Wong and others at the medical

    00:02:53 center LED the mated RIT trial to see if they could reduce inappropriate shocks from the implantable defibrillator they found that a simple change in the way Physicians set or programmed the device made all the difference the findings of reduction and mortality and uh inappropriate therapy were quite striking so we saw really close to a 90% reduction in inappropriate first

    00:03:19 therapies so this is quite dramatic and we saw a 55% reduction in mortality and we saw no increase in syn are passing out now with very simple programming of the device that is much safer and with fewer side effects very almost no side effects that we think that this will be more widely used in what we consider high-risk and what's been considered in the medical literature high-risk

    00:03:50 patients there are roughly 200,000 defibrillators implanted every year in the United States this is a quite a sizable number if one can reduce the the adverse effects the side effects of this um this is a significant advance and that was the aim of the study