M.D. Congestive heart failure causes shortness of breath, fatigue, difficult breathing when recumbent, and swelling of the abdomen and lower extremities. The symptoms vary in seriousness, depending on the severity of heart disease - from failure of the heart to pump blood in adequate amounts and from the body's response, fluid retention. This disease category is growing faster than any other cardiovascular illness, causing significant symptoms in more than one million additional people in the U.S. per year.
Medical therapy is the best hope for most patients and has improved dramatically.
For close to 100,000 people, there is a need for more than medical therapy. Interest in artificial hearts stems from UMC's heart transplant program, which evaluates more than 500 people each year with advanced heart failure. Since then, UMC's transplant surgeons have implanted more than 150 devices of various types in patients needing support prior to heart transplant. The program has developed methods of patient care that have drastically decreased complications and led to survival rates of 90 to 100 percent at transplantation. UMC's cardiothoracic surgery program has been successful in 90 percent of such patients with the high-risk conventional operation and totally avoided any form of mechanical support.