03/24/2009 12:55 pm
Life
An OnStar for Your Heart, by Dr. Holly Andersen (Video)
Editor’s Note: Dr. Holly Andersen is dual board certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiology, is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the American College of Sports Medicine and is an assistant professor of medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Andersen has been selected as one of America’s "Best Doctors" every year by Castle Connolly since 2001, and in 2008 was named by the Consumers’ Research Council of America as one of "America’s Top Cardiologists."
A new technology, which can detect and warn you of an impending heart attack even before you experience any symptoms, is being studied in patients right now. This device, called the AngelMed Guardian system, works much like a pacemaker — it is inserted beneath the skin below your left collarbone and is attached to a wire placed in your heart. Instead of pacing your heart, it continuously monitors for abnormal electrical changes that signal the beginning of a heart attack or even an impending one. If three abnormal electrical signals are detected in a row (within a minute and a half), the device will vibrate, notifying the patient to seek immediate medical help. Additionally, an external hand-held device beeps and flashes LEDs.
More than one million heart attacks occur in the United States each year and, sadly, approximately one third of heart-attack victims die before they ever get to a hospital. Fifty percent of heart-attack deaths occur within one hour of symptom onset — usually outside a hospital. The time it takes to receive treatment is directly related to a person’s survival and prognosis. People, especially women, do not get to an emergency room quickly because they don’t recognize their symptoms or they take a "let’s wait and see" approach. This can be deadly. About 20 percent of heart attacks go completely unrecognized by patients; half of these are totally silent. Average time from symptom onset to treatment at a hospital in this country is four to four and a half hours — most damage occurs within the first two hours. Additionally, many people who have had a heart attack report that they experienced symptoms in the days or hours preceding their attack. It is possible that this device will be able to detect these early signals, warn patients and therefore actually prevent a heart attack or sudden death from occurring.
A few years ago, I was in my office chatting with one of my patients who had just completed the exercise portion of his treadmill stress test. He was still hooked up to my electrical monitoring. During our conversation, I noticed that his electrocardiogram suddenly changed to signal an acute heart attack. I looked at him and he looked fine — he assured me he felt fine. I looked back at his electrical monitoring and, sure enough, he was having a heart attack. I gave him an aspirin and a beta blocker (another helpful medicine in the throes of a heart attack). I then escorted him to our emergency room and then to our cardiac catheterization laboratory, where we inserted a catheter into his blocked artery and opened it up with a balloon (angioplasty). My patient started sweating and experienced a little chest pressure on the way to the hospital, but his symptoms were fairly unimpressive. We opened up his artery so quickly, that there was no detectable damage.
If you are not going to have a heart attack in your cardiologist’s office then the AngelMed Guardian device may be the next best thing. It was recently approved for sale in Brazil, and is currently being investigated in a phase-II trial in the U.S. People at the greatest risk of having a heart attack are being enrolled. I am concerned about the potential for "false positives" or false alarms as this would create havoc, but I am interested in any device that could potentially save lives. I will keep you posted.
Video via Fox News:
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5 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment
How fascinating is this? I hope this works for people, and its always exciting to read new advances in medicine.
It’s interesting how it vibrates to warn you but, I am confused about the external hand-held device beeps and flashes LEDs. How does the device get the signals to start beeping and flashing? Is it somehow connected to the internal device? Does it work like the TV remote and send the device some infra-red signal?
Anyway, I hope to hear more about this as several people in my immediate family have had heart attacks, so this is great news.