Doctors Experimenting With Advanced Pacemakers for Heart Failure Patients
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Heart transplants are often very expensive, and drugs don't always work. Now, researchers may have found a third alternative for folks with bad hearts. Doctors are experimenting with advanced pacemakers. And as CNN medical correspondent Rhonda Rowland reports, early reviews are quite positive.</s>RHONDA ROWLAND, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Only two weeks ago, nurse Donna Lavai (ph) could not walk to the end of this hall to do her rounds.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was so out of breath. I would walk down the hall and my legs were like rubber.</s>ROWLAND: Several nights, she was forced to do her rounds in a wheelchair.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hello.</s>ROWLAND: Lavai has heart failure. Over the last decade, her heart weakened due to high blood pressure. Until now, the only two treatments for the condition were medication or a heart transplant. But doctors told her they may have something better, an experimental therapy: a new kind of pacemaker</s>DR. ANGEL LEON, CRAWFORD LONG HOSPITAL, ATLANTA, GEORGIA: I'm very excited. When I first heard about it, about this development, in the first few patients in which it was done, I didn't believe it in the least bit.</s>ROWLAND: The new pacemaker uses three wires, or leads, which are threaded into both sides of the heart to help it pump more efficiently.</s>LEON: This is the actual pacemaker device.</s>ROWLAND: Researchers say it could help about half of all heart failure patients, those with a conduction delay or faulty electrical system. (on camera): It's unlikely this type of pacemaker will cure heart failure, and it's too early to say if it will be an alternative to heart transplants or make transplants unnecessary. But the pacemakers appear to be improving the patient's quality of life dramatically. (voice-over): Improvements so dramatic that three pacemaker manufacturers are racing to get their devices approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hi sweet, boy. How you doing?</s>ROWLAND: For Donna Lavai, the pacemaker's allowing her to do what she loves: taking care of patients.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I've been able to walk up and down the halls without any trouble. Everybody tells me my color's better.</s>ROWLAND: Her heart may never be 100 percent again, but for now she can pick up the pace.</s>ROWLAND: An important question that needs to be answered is if heart failure patients with the pacemakers will live longer. In the pacemaker study that's furthest along, patients are being followed for just six months. That's not enough time to see -- that is time to see improvements in quality of life, but longer studies will be needed to see if the pacemakers actually extend life -- Bill.</s>HEMMER: Giving some folks some hope on this anyway.</s>ROWLAND: Oh, definitely. HEMMER; You mentioned three companies manufacturing, racing right now to get their product to the market. Sounds like there could be a whole lot of money made in this. If that is the case, how much would it cost a patient who would want a pacemaker surgery such as this?</s>ROWLAND: Well, it's about $12,000 for a heart failure patient to get one of these pacemakers implanted. To put that in perspective, a hospitalization for heart failure is $6,000. So two hospitalizations would cover the cost of a pacemaker. But most of these patients have multiple hospitalizations, so certainly patients would be ahead by getting the pacemaker. And also here, Bill, to just give you some figures, there are about four-and-a-half-million Americans with heart failure, so that's a lot of pacemakers. And, also, on top of that, they expect the number of people worldwide who will get pace makers to double or triple.</s>HEMMER: Wow, OK. Big market.</s>ROWLAND: Definitely.</s>HEMMER: Rhonda Rowland, thank you.