Tag Archives: Mechanical Circulatory support

Introduction The Johnson and Johnson Inc. (formerly Abiomed Inc.) Impella left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) are catheter-based, intravascular, transaortic micro-axial flow pumps that supplement native ventricular function while providing ventricular offloading. There are a range of left ventricular Impella devices of increasing size from Impella 2.5, Impella Cardiac Power (CP), Impella 5.0 and Impella 5.5. The Impella 2.5 and CP are inserted via a percutaneous femoral access route, and provide up to 3.5 L/min blood flow, whereas the Impella 5.0 is deployed surgically via a branch graft to the subclavian artery and provides up to 5 L/m

Introduction Professor Stephen Westaby Many of us have watched severe heart failure patients die miserably during haemorrhagic pulmonary oedema. The first for me was my 60-year-old grandfather when I was seven years old. Not something that was easily forgotten. Months later, in 1955, I watched the first episode of ‘Your life in their hands’ from the Hammersmith Hospital. They talked of open heart surgery using something called cardiopulmonary bypass. It was then, in the backstreets of a northern steel town, that I decided to be a heart surgeon. Figure 1. Skull pedestal power delivery Fifty years later, when the BBC resurrected the series,

Professor Jignesh K Patel The human heart has evolved over millennia whereby it is able to pump up to 20 litres per minute upon demand, it can adapt to work efficiently at altitudes of up to 30,000 feet and at high atmospheric pressures under sea. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first attempts at therapies for end-stage heart disease focused on orthotopic transplantation. Certainly, over the last 50 years since Barnard’s first heart transplant, significant advances in immunosuppression and post-transplant management have led to heart transplantation being the optimal long-term solution. One-year survival now exceeds 90% at many in

Cardio-oncology and obstetrics Many cancer therapies are cardiotoxic, and as cancer survival has improved over recent decades so the number of patients living to develop cardiovascular complications of these therapies has risen. A recent position statement by the European Society of Cardiology stresses that “the cured cancer patient of today…[is at risk of becoming]…the heart failure patient of tomorrow”1 and management of these patients increasingly involves a cardiologist. In a highly educational presentation, Dr Zaheer Yousef (University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff) addressed the management of left ventricular systolic dysfunction (