Dr.Wes has a very cool post up about Belgian soccer player Anthony Van Loo being saved by his ICD, with a video of him collapsing on the field, getting zapped, and then getting up, and another video of him describing the experience.

Very interesting stuff from Dr.Wes as usual!

Check this out:

An 81-year-old woman with a mercury-zinc powered permanent pacemaker experienced the sudden pain on her pacemaker pocket followed by an explosion. We are aware of no other report of the spontaneous and symptomatic bursting of a generator battery with fracture of the pulse generator capsule.

Emphasis mine. It’s an old paper (1987) and you can get the full text for free at the journal’s site, here.

Crazy, huh?

I can’t find this information anywhere — how much energy is applied per pulse by a typical pacemaker? I’m sure it depends on lead implantation and so on, but there must be some reasonable range used for the design of the devices.

A related question I’m also having trouble answering is “what is the typical pain threshold for cardiac stimulation?”. Any pointers to answers are welcome. The fact that most of the (potentially) relevant papers are locked up and not indexed by Google is not helping.

I have a special Hearty Friday for you today. Recently, there was a very cool paper published in Nature by some people at the University of Minnesota, Harvard, and several other institutions.

The HubMed page is here, the Nature Medicine page is here.

I plan to review this article at some point, but for now, here’s a picture of their recellularized scaffold. That is, they took an animal heart, washed all of the cells out, leaving the fibrous scaffold, and put cells back in, letting them grow back into a beating “heart”. This is snapped from Figure 4 of their paper.

AstraZeneca created a CHF simulator so that physicians can get a better idea of what it feels like, aiding their empathy and (hopefully) diagnostic accuracy. It runs on Macs, so Apple has a feature on it here.