Word: cardiac
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...procedure was remarkable mainly because skeletal muscle and cardiac muscle are structurally different. Heart muscle works continuously, using oxygen at a steady rate. It never tires. Skeletal muscle is designed for short bursts of intense effort and fatigues easily. Ten years ago, while operating on a patient whose pacemaker had slipped out of place, Magovern made a chance observation. The patient's chest muscle, stimulated by the misplaced device, had doubled in size and showed no signs of fatigue. Other researchers independently proved that skeletal muscles actually come to resemble their cardiac counterparts when electrically conditioned...
...University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Cardiac Surgeon Larry Stephenson has been exploring other applications. By wrapping conditioned skeletal muscle into a fist-size pouch, he has created a mini-pumping chamber that he hopes can be used to boost circulation. Implanted in animals, the pouches, which may be located almost anywhere in the body, have enhanced blood flow as much as 20% for eight hours. Stephenson believes that such auxiliary pumps could reduce the need for risky open-heart surgery. They might also obviate the need for transplants for patients whose hearts are weak but not completely failing. Implanting such...
...sensitive to cocaine, as some people are sensitive to almost any drug. It's not clear how rare this is, but it's not common." Mitchell Rosenthal, director of New York City's Phoenix House, a drug rehabilitation group, disagreed. He thinks that cocaine may frequently cause death by cardiac arrest. "Over the past three years," he said, "the evidence has been coming out of medical examiners' offices and emergency rooms, but the message has been blunted by the sexy qualities of the drug, by the fact that so many people mix drugs and alcohol...
...Medical Center in Boston, who suspects that heart damage from cocaine occurs more often than most specialists believe, partly because doctors seldom ask heart patients if they have used drugs. "There are still superb cardiologists," says Isner, "who are surprised to find out that cocaine can cause a lethal cardiac event." In a paper published last October in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, Isner reported on seven people, ages 20 to 37, who used cocaine shortly before suffering apparent heart attacks. Six of the subjects, including one of two who died, had no evidence of heart disease...
...drug can act in a number of ways to cause death. It can interfere with the electrical system of the heart or brain, causing the heart to go into ventricular fibrillation, a purposeless twitching that quickly results in death. In addition, cocaine may bring on a cardiac event by temporarily constricting arteries...