It ran on compressed air provided by the external unit and connected to the mechanical heart with tubes (Pence, DATE). It was constructed primarily of plastic, polyurethene and aluminum, and attached to the ventricles with Velcro, with one strip of the two-piece system attached to the bottoms of the ventricles. The Jarvik-7 was designed to replace the lower two chambers of the heart, the left and right atria, the parts that do the pumping. Medically it was a difficult decision because of the very real possibility that the surgery itself could kill Clark (Pence, DATE). The heart-lung transplant program had a cutoff age of 50 (Pence, DATE). He might have been a candidate for a heart-lung transplant, except for his age, 61. Clark had not only severe heart disease but severe emphysema as well. There were serious medical issues involved in the decision to implant the first Jarvik-7 heart into Barney Clark. By comparison, DeVries was working on his artificial heart working within rules established within the medical profession (Pence, DATE). Cooley repeated the operation on a human two years later with similar results. It turned out later that Cooley had tried his device in several calves, all of whom died. Instead, Cooley implanted his LVAD, without permission from the United States Public Health Services committee that reviews medical experiments (Pence, DATE). The patient, Haskell Karp, was supposed to receive an artificial, in itself a very new and controversial procedure then. In 1969, a colleague of DeBakey secretly hired some of DeBakey’s staff in an attempt to develop his own artificial heart. And was contained on a rolling cart fo the patient could have some mobility (Pence, DATE).īarney Clark was not the first patient caught up in ethical discussions regarding an artificial heart, however. The patient would have to be connected by tubes to the external machinery, which weighed 375 lb. DeVries, working with Robert Jarvik, who had previously invented the first devices for hemodialysis to support patients with kidney failure, worked on an artificial heart that would attach to the atria, replace the ventricles, and be pumped from external equipment. During that time they provided $200 million in funds for that research (Pence, DATE). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the development of artificial hearts from 1964 to 1982 as well as LVAD’s. LVAD’s, by supporting the function of the ventricles, can keep a heart going until a transplant is available. Research on that approach continues to this day. Michael DeBakey developed a “left ventricle assist device” (LVAD) in the 1960’s (Pence, DATE). This research led to a variety of developments in the treatment of life-threatening heart disease. Shortly after World War II, two members of congress who had special interests in medical issues generally and heart disease in particular pushed for the government to fund research on the causes and treatments of heart disease (Pence, DATE).
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