Heart Medicine
A teenager from McAllen, Texas has made medical history in the field of heart medicine. Frank De Santiago has officially been the first patient to ever be medically discharged from a pediatric hospital with a mechanical heart assist device.
The device, named the HeartMate II, is a mechanical heart pump that saved De Santiago’s life. De Santiago was sent to a hospital with what doctors assumed were flu-like symptoms in May, and has been in the hospital non-stop until October, when doctors implanted the HeartMate II, leading to progressively successful rehab sessions and subsequently allowing De Santiago to leave the hospital and live his normal life.
Doctors discovered that De Santiago had dilated cardiomyopathy — a condition that left his heart more than twice the size of a normal heart. The condition left De Santiago with signs of a stroke, the culprit being his heart’s inability to pump blood effectively. He was immediately sent into an operating room, where doctors first implanted a temporary heart device.
When signs pointed to more failure, the doctors looked to the HeartMate II to save De Santiago’s life. The device is implanted into the chest cavity next to the heart and assists the patient in living life normally.
Normal is exactly what Frank De Santiago wanted. Like many other children who are suffering from heart failure, De Santiago has not been able to experience life normally, as his other peers do. Now, with the help of the new heart assist device, De Santiago can go to school, exercise, eat well, and enjoy life the way he was meant to. Other young heart patients are often kept in the intensive care unit, unable to live life normally, hoping and praying for a transplant. The HeartMate II offers these children the opportunity to live a normal life while waiting for a transplant.
More research may lead to a more universal use of ventricular assist devices (VADs) in helping children cope with heart failure. More and more kids are dying from heart disease, a surprising statistic as conventional knowledge states that heart disease usually affects the middle aged or elderly. The truth is, heart disease is the number one killer in the United States and around the world. An average of 500,000 Americans die from heart disease every year, with the only effective long-term treatment being a heart transplant.
The HeartMate II may offer patients an option that does not require debilitating and expensive drugs and constant hospitalization. For De Santiago, it has done just that and so much more. To him, life is new and his opportunity, real. Hopefully, in the future, VADs like the HeartMate II can offer the hundreds of thousands of heart patients the same real opportunity.
Tim Du
Physician Network Writer
