Like a car with misfiring cylinders, a heart that s out of sync will still pump but the job becomes much harder. Patients with heart failure can be treated with drugs or surgery. New work from Johns Hopkins indicates that a third option pacemakers work best for a particular subset of patients. Hearts that fire mis-timed electrical signals between the left and right sides makes the heart weak and wobbly.
Doctors call the condition dissynchrony.
Using magnetic resonance imaging, the Hopkins team found that patients in whom the condition was most severe got the biggest benefit from the implantation of a pacemaker. Dr. David Kass was the study s lead author. It will represent certainly a paradigm change in that it would become among the first non- drug oriented therapies for heart failure. It doesn t require open chest surgery. It s not a ventricular assist, it s not a transplant.