Explore Business Standard
Heart
As the market for leadless pacemakers grows in India, doctors point out definite advantages of the technology for heart disease patients but also call for more data and analyses on its long-term effects. At the same time, researchers have written about the lack of a national registry tracking pacemaker implants, including conventional ones. A pacemaker helps a heart patient control an irregular heartbeat. In November, Abbott, the US-based healthcare and medical devices company, introduced the AVEIR VR single-chamber ventricular leadless pacemaker in India for treating patients having slow heart rhythms. The device has been approved by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization, Abbott said in a statement. The AVEIR VR device is implanted directly into the heart's right lower chamber (ventricle) through a "minimally invasive, catheter-based procedure from the groin", thereby requiring no surgical cuts to the chest or wires, it said. Doctors consider a 'leadless' pacemaker an
E-cigarettes and marijuana may have harmful effects on the heart similar to those caused by tobacco cigarettes, opening the door to abnormal heart rhythms, according to a study conducted in mice. E-cigarettes and heated tobacco products have become popular because the public perceives them as being less harmful than smoking, the researchers said. Similarly, legal recreational marijuana has become more common in recent years, and is also frequently viewed by the public as being safer than smoking tobacco, they said. "We found that cigarettes, e-cigarettes, and marijuana greatly interfere with the electrical activity, structure, and neural regulation of the heart," said study lead author Huiliang Qiu, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the US. "Often, any single change can lead to arrhythmia disease. Unfortunately, these adverse effects on the heart are quite comprehensive," Qiu said. The study, published in the journal Heart Rhythm, expo
Scientists have identified the mechanism behind how SARS-CoV-2 virus damages the heart tissue. People infected with COVID-19 are at a significantly higher risk for developing inflammation of the heart muscle, abnormal heart rhythms, blood clots, stroke, heart attacks, and heart failure for at least a year after infection, compared to those who have not been infected with the virus, said the study. The scientists, who are from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, US, then used a drug to reverse the toxic effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus protein on the heart. "Our research shows that individual SARS-CoV-2 proteins can each do major damage to specific tissues in the body similar to what has been found for other viruses like HIV and Zika," said senior author Zhe Han. Their findings, based on research with fruit flies and mouse heart cells, were published in Nature Communications Biology. Although scientists around the world rapidly developed vaccines and medications to lessen the ..