Someone donates heart to Dick Cheney.

Dick Cheney recovering at hospital after heart transplant

By NBC News

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was recovering Saturday at a Virginia hospital after receiving a heart transplant, his office said.

Cheney was in the Intensive Care Unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, his office said.

Cheney, 71, who served as vice president in the George W. Bush administration, has had a long history of heart trouble and has been on the cardiac transplant list for more than 20 months.

“Although the former Vice President and his family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift,” aide Kara Ahern said in a written statement that was authenticated by several close associates of the former vice president. ….

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Diabetes: Pancreatic Transplant

A pancreatic transplant involves replacing some or all of a diabetic person’s faulty islets of Langerhns cells with healthy ones that will produce insulin. Recently researchers have made important progress since the mid- 1990s in transplanting islet cells from donated pancreases into people with severe type 1 diabetes.

The Edmonton Protocol

1995 researchers working in Emonton, Canada, reported an important advance. They had extracted islet cells from donated pancreases from people who had died and injected them into the liver. The technique – now called the Edmonton Protocol is surprisingly simple and can be carried out under local anesthetic. Using a fine needle, the cells are injected into the main blood vessel of the liver. After the transplant, people are usually able to go home within 24 hours.

SMART HEART: Scientists develop artificial heart that beats like the real thing

By Adam Sage in Paris
An artificial heart that beats almost exactly like the real thing is to be implanted in patients within three years in a trial that may offer hope to heart disease sufferers unable to receive a transplant.

The device, which uses electronic sensors to regulate the heart rate and blood flow, was developed by Alain Carpentier, France’s leading cardiac surgeon, and engineers from the group that makes Airbus aircraft. Presented yesterday, it was described by its inventors as the closest thing yet to the human heart. “If you show the graphs to a cardiac surgeon, he will say it’s a human heart,” Professor Carpentier said. “But no, it’s not a human heart, it’s the prosthesis.”

He said that he had spent two decades on the project because “I found it intolerable to see young people – aged 40, 45 or 50 – dying of massive heart attacks without having a prosthesis available to replace their hearts”.

The French announcement is the latest in a race by doctors to produce a device that could be fitted into the 20,000 patients a year worldwide who are unable to receive a life-saving heart transplant because of a shortage of donors.

Courtesy and Thanks: The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5026788.ece