Change the beat to halt heart disease
Animal tests on John Hopkins reveal that using a pacemaker change a heartbeat’s rhythm may be an effective way to delay heart failure.
The treatment called Pacemaker Induced Transient Asynchrony, or PITA ultimately zaps a small electric shock to change the heartbeat’s rhythm and then bring it back to its original beat.
The treatment was conducted on dogs and was found to reverse cellular damage on the heart caused by the hormones, like adrenaline, and fixes the damage to the motor proteins in the heart muscle that generate force
“It’s the process of going back and forth that is important. In a way, we’ve attached a light-switch timer to a pacemaker — like the automatic timers used in homes to turn lights on and off — but here it flips the pacemaker between synchronous and out-of-synch states each day,” says David Kass, M.D., a professor of medicine and biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We’re very excited about prospects for this therapy because if further research confirms its effectiveness and safety, it’s relatively easy to implement. The pacemaker hardware already exists, and with some software upgrades, we may have a treatment that would benefit many, many people.”
Kass speculates that the ideal patient for PITA, if further research affirms its value, would be one with heart failure who has normal synchronous heart contractions and is a candidate for an internal defibrillator; this covers about 75% of heart failure patients.
The study was published online in the Dec. 23 issue of Science Translational Medicine.
