On This Day, Worlds First Artificial Heart Was Successfully Implanted Into Human Body

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The Logical Indian Crew

On This Day, World's First Artificial Heart Was Successfully Implanted Into Human Body

On December 2, 1982, Willem Johan Kolff, the world's most creative inventor of artificial organs, implanted the artificial heart into Barney Clark, a dentist from Seattle suffering from serious congestive heart failure. The 61-year-old lived for 112 days tethered to an external pneumatic compressor, a device weighing some 180 kgs.

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Modern medicine eagerly awaits a synthetic replacement for a heart. A fully-functional artificial heart would not just lower the need for heart transplants but also tame the demand for the organ, which greatly exceeds the supply.

Although the heart is theoretically a pump, it embodies subtleties that defy straightforward emulation with synthetic materials and power supplies. Consequences of these complications include serious foreign-body rejection and external batteries that limit mobility. These issues limited the lifespan of early human recipients for hours to days.

Early Developments

In 1937, Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov made the first artificial heart, which was implanted in a dog.

On July 2, 1952, 41-year-old Henry Opitek made medical history at Harper University Hospital at Wayne State University in Michigan. The Dodrill-GMR heart machine, considered the first operational mechanical heart, was successfully used while performing heart surgery. He became the first human being to be kept alive using a mechanical heart.

In 1952, Dr Forest Dewey Dodrill used the machine to bypass Henry Opitek's left ventricle for 50 minutes while he opened the patient's left atrium and repaired the mitral valve.

In simpler terms, the doctor used an artificial heart machine during surgery as a temporary substitute for the left ventricle, the main pumping chamber of the heart, which propels blood into the aorta. The surgery was performed on a 41-year-old man who had a defective heart valve. It was one of the first instances of survival of a patient undergoing heart surgery that involved the use of a mechanical substitute for part of the heart.

In 1953, a heart-lung machine was first used during successful open-heart surgery. John Heysham Gibbon, the machine's inventor, operated and developed the heart-lung substitute himself.

Following these advances, scientific interest in developing a solution for heart disease developed in numerous research groups worldwide.

In 1949, William Sewell and William Glenn, doctors at the Yale School of Medicine, built a precursor to the modern artificial heart pump using an Erector Set, dime-store toys and assorted odds and ends . The external pump successfully bypassed the heart of a dog for over an hour.

Paul Winchell invented an artificial heart with the help of Henry Heimlich and held the first patent for such device. The University of Utah developed a similar apparatus during the period, but Winchell's heart was cited as prior art when they tried to patent it. The university requested that Winchell donate the heart to the University of Utah, which he did later.

On December 12, 1957, Willem Johan Kolff, the world's most creative inventor of artificial organs, implanted an artificial heart into a dog. The dog lived for one and a half hours.

In 1958, Domingo Liotta presented his work at the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs meeting held in Atlantic City in March 1961. During the meeting, Liotta described the implantation of three types of orthotopic TAHs in dogs, each using a different source of external energy: an implantable rotating pump with an external electric motor, an implantable electric motor, and a pneumatic pump.

In 1964, the National Institutes of Health began the Artificial Heart Program to put an artificial heart into a human. The program's purpose was to develop an implantable artificial heart, including the power source, to replace a failing heart.

In February 1966, Adrian Kantrowitz gained international fame when he performed the world's first permanent implantation of a partial mechanical heart at Maimonides Medical Center.

In 1967, Kolff left Cleveland Clinic to start the Division of Artificial Organs at the University of Utah and continue his work on the artificial heart. Over the years, over 200 physicians, students, engineers and faculty developed, tested and improved Kolff's artificial heart. To help manage his many endeavours, Kolff assigned project managers and each project was named after its manager. Robert Jarvik, a graduate student, was the project manager for the artificial heart, subsequently renamed the Jarvik 7.

Implantation In Human Body

In 1981, William DeVries submitted a request to the FDA to implant the Jarvik 7 into a human body. On December 2, 1982, Kolff implanted the Jarvik 7 into Barney Clark, a dentist from Seattle suffering from serious congestive heart failure. The 61-year-old lived for 112 days tethered to an external pneumatic compressor, a device weighing some 180 kgs, but during that time, he suffered prolonged periods of confusion and several instances of bleeding, and asked many times to be allowed to die.

The Jarvik-7 was designed by Robert K. Jarvik as a temporary replacement device for patients awaiting heart transplants. Later, was used as a permanent heart transplant for only four other patients, but was used by various individuals temporarily as they waited for transplants.

At the time, the cause of Clark's death was stated as "circulatory collapse and secondary multi-organ system failure." He left behind a legacy. Clark's willingness to pioneer this new device infused life into mechanical heart device research and challenged all people to open their minds and question, "what is possible?"

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Writer : Tashafi Nazir
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