June 5th, 2011 by CodeBlog in Expert Interviews
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Ready to learn more about nurses who work beyond the bedside? Nurses who work in the Cardiac Catheterization Lab (CCL) play an important role in cardiac care. Amy Sellers, RN BSN CCRN CSC CMC blogs at Nursing Influence and graciously agreed to give us a peek at what a nurse is responsible for doing in the CCL.
Amy has worked in the Cath Lab for about 6 months now. She previously worked in CVICU for almost 5 years before deciding that she needed a new challenge. She is paid hourly and works three 12 hour shifts per week (all daytime Mon-Fri) with lots of opportunities for overtime and call shifts.
A cath lab is an area of the hospital that uses fluoroscopy and contrast dye to check for narrowing/blockages in arteries or veins in the body. Using special equipment, they are able to perform angioplasty (open the arteries with a balloon), place stents, insert IVC filters (a filter that is inserted into a large vein which prevents blood clots that form in the leg from getting to the lungs) as well as inserting pacemakers/ICDs. ICDs are Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators. They detect if a patient’s heart goes into a lethal rhythm and provides a shock to the heart if necessary to get it beating correctly again.
What do you do all day? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at code blog - tales of a nurse*
June 4th, 2011 by DeborahSchwarzRPA in News
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New York Times article highlights transplant donor and recipients at New York-Presbyterian Hospital
UK NHS Organ Donation Checkbox
As organ transplantation has advanced and improved in recent decades, more and more patients’ lives are saved every year. But the most pressing problem in organ transplantation has yet to be solved: the shortage of donor organs available to the thousands of people waiting on lists for a new kidney, liver, lung, heart, or other organ. People who intend to donate may not indicate their wishes to family members before their death, or families are reluctant to make that decision in the midst of profound grief and loss. For others, donating an organ was just never something they knew much about or even considered.
When they do choose to donate a loved one’s organs, families usually remain anonymous, as do those whose lives they save. Perhaps that is why articles like the one in the New York Times on May 16, 2011, touch and inspire readers so deeply. This version of an increasingly common story captures the essential soul-searching, as well as the profound gratitude, hope, and solace, that marked the meeting of Mirtala Garcia and the people who received her husband’s organs. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Columbia University Department of Surgery Blog*
May 14th, 2011 by Mary Knudson in Opinion
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I’ve been working for a couple of months on an in-depth article on personal defibrillators that are implanted beneath the skin of a person’s chest to shock a heart that starts shaking, thereby restoring its normal beating and preventing sudden death. Discussing these defibrillators is extremely complex, which is why I am spending so much time on researching and writing the article intended to help patients and their families make an informed decision by learning the truth about the devices known as implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) — the good and the bad, your life saved vs nothing happening or the accompanying risks and harm you may receive. So when I heard that a new study would be presented at the annual scientific meeting this week of the Heart Rhythm Society, a professional organization of cardiologists and electrophysiologists who use cardiac devices in their patients, I made sure to get an advance copy of what would be presented and interview the lead author.
Potentially such a study would be of interest to physicians and to patients considering getting an ICD because it looked at all shocks the defibrillators gave the heart in patients who took part in the clinical trial, including those sent for life-threatening rhythms and in error. For several reasons, I felt the study is not ready to report to the public. It is only an abstract. The full study has not yet been written, let alone published in a peer-reviewed journal or even accepted for publication. Patients with defibrillators who received shocks were matched to only one other patient who was not shocked, but the two patients were not matched for what other illnesses or poor quality of health they had. Yet they were matched to see who lived the longest and the study looked at death for all causes, not just heart-related. One critical question the study sought to answer was this: Do the shocks themselves cause a shortened life (even if they temporarily save it) or is a shortened life the result of the types of heart rhythms a person experiences? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at HeartSense*
May 11th, 2011 by PJSkerrett in Health Tips, Research
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A paper in a recent edition of Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) offers the contradictory conclusion that taking in less salt—a key goal of U.S. health and dietary recommendations—is bad for you. But before you roll your eyes and groan about flip-flops in science, know that this study isn’t the kind of work on which you or anyone should base dietary decisions.
In this study of 3,681 men and women from Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Poland, Romania and Russia whose health was followed for eight years, participants with the lowest sodium excretion (which is a good measure of sodium intake) were 56% more likely to have died from cardiovascular disease than those with the highest sodium excretion. Among the nearly 2,100 participants with normal blood pressure at the study’s start, sodium excretion (sodium intake) had no effect on the development of high blood pressure.
These are startling findings. If true, they would undercut major programs by the U.S. government to reduce Americans’ intake of salt—the main source of sodium—from prepared and processed foods and at home. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
March 31st, 2011 by Mary Knudson in Expert Interviews, Health Tips
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I am saddened that Elizabeth Taylor died recently of heart failure. In his appreciation of her, film critic Roger Ebert said in the Chicago Sun-Times, “Of few deaths can it be said that they end an era, but hers does.”
She is a star that many of us felt we knew. She was a great actress and a woman of great beauty who was a hard working champion of people with AIDS and always seemed to be a determined person who knew herself. Yet she always had a vulnerable side. So many marriages, so many illnesses, so many, many surgeries, over 40, I’ve read. And then her heart problem developed. Which leads me to talk a little about that problem, mitral valve leakage.
The heart’s mitral valve
The heart has four chambers and four valves that open to let blood through to the next chamber of the heart and on out to the body and back. The valves, acting as gates, then immediately close to prevent the blood from running back where it just came from. The mitral valve looks like a mouth with leaflets that look like lips that open and close. When I saw it in action on an echocardiogram, a test that uses sound waves to show moving pictures of the heart, I thought it looked like a very sensuous mouth. Each of the valves looks different. But because it looks like a mouth, the mitral valve stands out. Blood has just left the lungs carrying oxygen and arrives at the left atrium of the heart. The mitral valve’s mouth opens to let the blood pour through into the left ventricle. As the left ventricle contracts, the mitral valve closes and the aortic valve opens to allow blood to leave the heart and get out to the body.
A mitral valve can start to leak. This can range anywhere from a condition that is minor and does not need treatment to a serious problem that leads to a weakened heart and heart failure. In Elizabeth Taylor’s case, it led to heart failure and her symptoms must have included difficulty breathing and fatigue.
I asked Edward K. Kasper, M.D., director of clinical cardiology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, to talk a little about what can go wrong with a mitral valve. I should mention for disclosure that Ed is my cardiologist and co-authored with me the book Living Well with Heart Failure, the Misnamed, Misunderstood Condition:
A leaky mitral valve – mitral regurgitation, is common and has many causes. Most people tolerate a leaky valve well, but some need surgery to correct the leak. Repair is preferred to replacement. The MitraClip (which was used for Elizabeth Taylor) is a new technique to try and fix mitral regurgitation in the cath lab rather than in the operating room. There are no long-term comparison studies of this technique compared to standard OR repair – that I know of. Repair is currently the gold standard for those who have severe mitral regurgitation and symptoms of heart failure. Outcomes are better including improvement in symptoms and survival in patients with repair rather than replacement.
What takes a person from a leaking mitral valve to heart failure?
The leakage back into the left atrium increases the pressure in the left atrium. This increased pressure in the left atrium is passed back to the lungs, causing fluid to leak into the lungs, leading to heart failure. With time, the demands of severe mitral regurgitation on the left ventricle will lead to a weakened left ventricle, a dilated cardiomyopathy (disease of the heart muscle). We try to prevent this by operating before it gets to that point.
Mitral regurgitation can also be a consequence of a dilated cardiomyopathy – the orifice of the mitral valve enlarges as the left ventricle enlarges. The leaflets of the mitral valve do not enlarge. Therefore, they no longer close correctly, leading to mitral regurgitation.
It’s easy to see why anyone would want to opt for the Evalve MitraClip over open heart surgery. The MitraClip is little different from a common test known as an angiogram in which a catheter is passed through the femoral vein in the groin up to the heart. In this repair procedure, however, the catheter guides a clip to the mitral valve where the metal clip covered with polyester fabric is positioned over the leakage and brought down below the open flaps and back up, fastening the valve’s open leaflets together. The manufacturer, Abbott, shows in a video here how blood still is able to pass through on either side of the fastening.
Elizabeth Taylor got her MitraClip repair a year and a half ago, so it must have worked for awhile. Then about six weeks ago she was hospitalized with heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles where she died with her family at her bedside. For more on mitral regurgitation, see this NIH site.
Heart failure has many other causes. High blood pressure can damage the lining of blood vessels leading to deposits of cholesterol. Coronary artery disease causes heart attacks. A heart attack kills part of the heart muscle, forcing the rest of the heart to work harder and in doing so, get large and weak. Only about half the people who develop heart failure have a weak heart. In another cause of heart failure, the left ventricle becomes stiff and the heart does not fill properly. And in some heart failure, the heart itself is normal but connecting blood vessels are not or a valve may be too narrow. In all of these cases, a person is said to have heart failure because the heart and vascular system are not able to provide the body with the blood and oxygen it needs.
*This blog post was originally published at HeartSense*
