New Device Helps Heart Failure Patients Stay Out Of The Hospital

BOSTON (CBS) – Gene Kelly of Rockland, Maine has severe heart failure and has been hospitalized seven times in the past year. “You just can’t do anything,” the 54-year-old explains. “It feels like you just ran a marathon and you’re done.” With heart failure, elevated fluid pressures can cause fluid to back up into the lungs, making it hard to breathe. Dr. Lynn Warner Stevenson is the Director of the Heart Failure and Cardiomyopathy Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She says if those fluid pressures are kept under control, patients can be kept out of the hospital. “One of the things we’ve learned is that those fluid pressures increase several weeks before patients notice them,” says Dr. Stevenson. “And if we can get them and lower them early enough, we can often prevent these symptoms from leading to hospitalizations.” Now a device called CardioMEMS will allow doctors to measure those pressures in the heart and act on them without even seeing the patient. A tiny pressure sensor is thread through a leg vessel into the heart and deposited into a small vessel feeding the lung. Once a day a patient lies down on a special pillow, presses a button, and pressure data are transmitted wirelessly to a physician’s computer. A recent clinical trial found that CardioMEMS was associated with a 37% reduction in the rate of hospitalization in patients with heart failure. Dr. Akshay Desai, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s who sp...
Source: WBZ-TV - Breaking News, Weather and Sports for Boston, Worcester and New Hampshire - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Local News Seen On WBZ-TV Syndicated Local Watch Listen Brigham and Women's Hospital CardioMEMS Gene Kelly Heart Failure Heart Failure and Cardiomyopathy Center Mallika Marshall Source Type: news