A recent study by Stanford’s HCM Center found that HCM patients whose exercise options have been limited by the disease may find it difficult to adapt to their newly restrictive lifestyle. The researchers found that it was very important for patients to fully understood their restrictions and limitations.
Interacting with other HCM patients in the greater HCM community provided an effective way to obtain social support and information which supplemented that obtained from health care providers.
If you are looking for a lengthy, thorough and analytical summary of the current guidelines worldwide for the assessment and treatment of HCM, then this article is a must. Nature, the International Weekly Journal of Science, has put together a comprehensive article summarizing and synthesizing all of this information. Just make sure you have some time to read and digest. This is not for those who like to get their soundbites on Twitter!
St. Jude Medical announced today that as many as 400,000 of its Fortify, Fortify Assura, Quadra Assura, Unify, Unify Assura and Unify Quadra implantable cardiac defibrillator (ICD) and cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillator (CRT-D) devices manufactured prior to May 23, 2015 are subject to a recall notice due to a risk of premature battery depletion which may render the device unable to deliver a life saving shock.
According to the FDA, the patients most at risk are those who require lifesaving shocks and those who are pacemaker dependent.
The problem has so far resulted in two deaths.
Patients with these devices should contact their physicians for advice about how to proceed, and should seek immediate medical attention if they hear a low-battery alert from their Merlin monitoring device. Continue reading “St. Jude Medical ICD Recall”
According to a recent study published in JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology, previously abandoned pacemaker and implantable defibrillator leads which have been capped off and left behind following replacement were harder to extract later. These abandoned leads also made it more difficult to treat device infections.
When interviewed about the significance of these study results, several physicians knowledgeable in the field further emphasized that lead removal requires special skill and equipment not typical for the average physician who implants cardiac devices. Hence, patients facing a potential lead extraction should consider their options carefully and seek care from a specialist in lead extraction.
A recent study of U.K. HCM patients compared a racially mixed sample of 425 patients, including 163 black patients and 262 Caucasians. The study concluded that while asymmetric septal hypertrophy was the predominant pattern in both ethnic groups, black patients had more instances of apical and concentric hypertrophy, which could, in turn, be responsible for delayed diagnosis of these patients.
The researchers concluded that even though the success rate for HCM patients was approximately half that of patients who suffered from AFib but did not have HCM, catheter ablation is still an effective treatment for HCM patients; especially for those HCM patients who suffer from paroxysmal AFib and who have smaller atria.
This article, published in this week’s Women’s Health magazine, features the former ballerina and beauty queen turned vocal patient activist. These days, Lindsay has focused her efforts on saving lives from sudden cardiac arrest. Lindsay’s efforts in the state of Ohio have resulted in proposed legislation to identify student athletes at risk of sudden cardiac arrest, while her partnership with the American Heart Association is steadily making CPR and AED training a graduation requirement in high schools across the nation.
Watch for more life-saving advocacy from Lindsay in the future. She is clearly much more than another pretty face!
Updated to include a video of Lindsay discussing her implantation with a S-ICD device.
Could your next implantable defibrillator use a light beam instead of electricity to restore a normal heart rhythm? According to a recent study, this might just become reality some day.
A recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation was able to use optogenetics — which involves embedding light-sensitive proteins in living tissue — to terminate ventricular arrhythmias in the hearts of mice. Scientists at Johns Hopkins then created a computer simulation of the human heart to figure out if this technology could work on humans as well.
Check out this video for interviews with the researchers and further explanations of the study. Though still highly experimental, this could be the technology of the future.
Stay tuned……
The children/adolescents/young adults who participated in the study all carried at least one gene associated with HCM, and were members of families with strong histories of HCM. None of the 38 young people had clinical manifestations of HCM at the beginning of the study period, while 4 went on to develop HCM by the end of the study. In collecting the data analyzed in the study, the test results of the 4 individuals with HCM were compared to the 34 individuals that did not have HCM at the end of the study.
The factors associated with the development of overt HCM, as identified by the researchers, were: abnormal left ventricular relaxation and higher ejection fraction, EKG changes, longer mitral valve leaflets, higher NT-proBNP concentrations and troponin values.
In the conclusion, the authors acknowledged the need for further research and investigation in order to better understand the natural course and evolution of the disease.
I have had the joy of being a Registered Nurse for over 40 years. I was born wanting to be a nurse and started bandaging teddy bears at the age of three. By the age of 5, I was creating “medicines” by spinning blades of grass mixed with clover flowers in the front wheel well of an upside down tricycle.
As I got older, I moved on to be a Candy Striper and a Nurse’s Aide, and then I went on to get my degree as a RN, a BSN, and MSN and became a teacher, administrator, and researcher. All of this cannot REALLY prepare you for; “Being on the other side of the bed” which is what happens when a health care professional who is used to caring for patients becomes a patient themselves. Continue reading “Guest Blogger – Surgical Myectomy: A Twice in a Lifetime Experience – By Jill Celeste”
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