A cardiac pacemaker is a small electronic device that is placed into your chest, just behind your heart. The device has an electronic sensor that recognizes heartbeat activity in the area surrounding your heart. This sensor then stimulates the electrical impulses within the muscles of your heart to stimulate them and start pumping blood to your heart. The pacemaker can sense when the heart begins to slow down and stop, weakens, increases or decreases its pulse rate, or if the heartbeat is irregular. When these changes occur, the electrical impulses are then analyzed by the pacemaker and a series of actions are performed - some move the electrodes closer together, others move them further apart.
Different actions are then carried out by the cardiac pacemaker depending on what it senses and what it wants to do. One action that is generally used is called "ventricular delay". If there is a ventricular delay, the cardiac muscles contract much more strongly than normal. The reason for this is to provide the heart with ample blood flow so it can pump oxygenated blood to all of the areas of the body where it is needed. As the heart continues to slow down, or becomes weak, this same sort of action cannot help it and therefore the ventricles contract even more strongly.
The demand for cardiac pacemaker is high in the U.S due to increasing cases of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). According to the American Heart Association's Heart and Stroke Statistics 2019 Update, around 48% of all adults in the U.S. suffered from some type of CVD in 2016. The U.S. is witnessing adoption of wirelessly powered, leadless pacemakers. In February 2020, researchers at Texas Heart Institute and University of California, Los Angeles used its innovative pacing system to reveal the ability to provide synchronized biventricular pacing to a human-sized heart in a preclinical research model.
No comments:
Post a Comment