In a new study from the University of Auckland, researchers found a revolutionary pacemaker can re-establish the heart’s naturally irregular beat.
Currently, all pacemakers pace the heart metronomically, which means a very steady, even pace.
But in a healthy individual, it is constantly on the move. This is because the heart rate is coupled to breathing. It goes up on inspiration, and it goes down on expiration, and that is a natural phenomenon in all animals and humans.
All heart disease patients lose the heart rate variability, which is an early sign that something is going wrong.
The team says people with high blood pressure, people with heart failure, their heart rate is not being modulated by their breathing. It may be a little bit, but it’s very, very depressed, very suppressed.
There’s nothing really on the market that will cure heart failure. All the drugs will do is to make people feel better.
This new pacemaker brings back this variability, which is natural, in a way people could call it ‘nature’s pacemaker’.”
This study shows introducing a natural variation in the heartbeat improves the heart’s ability to pump blood through the body.
The other big news is that the team gets a 20 percent improvement in cardiac output, which is effectively the ability of the heart to pump blood through the body.
The team says the pacemaker is almost like a bionic device. It understands the signals from the body that tells the device when we’re breathing in and when we’re breathing out.
And then the device has to communicate back to the body and pace the heart up during breathing in and down during breathing out.
The next steps are well underway, with plans to recruit patients into a trial planned for later this year in New Zealand.
If you care about heart health, please read studies about a big cause of heart failure, and common antibiotic drug linked to higher heart attack risk.
For more information about heart health, please see recent studies about fish oil supplements linked to dangerous heart problem, and results showing that widely used painkillers may harm your heart, kidneys, sleep and bodyweight.
The study is published in Basic Research in Cardiology and was conducted by Professor Julian Paton et al.
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