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About 3 million Americans live with cardiovascular pacemakers. But over time, scar tissue or blood clots can form around the leads, or wires, that carry the electrical impulses from the pacemaker to the heart. Scar tissue or clots may hinder the flow of blood, potentially resulting in swollen extremities or pain. However, the incidence and clinical impact of such lead-related venous obstruction, or LRVO, among patients with pacemaker devices is not well characterized. Physician-researchers found that the incidence of symptomatic LRVO among patients implanted with cardiovascular implantable electronic devices to be four times higher than previously reported—with only a minority...

Dr. Daniel Mascarenhas has a heart for recycling. The local cardiologist, is part of a study to remove pacemakers from deceased bodies and supply them to impoverished patients in Bombay, India. Pacemakers can cost upwards of $6,000 and defibrillators can reach pricetags of $27,000. Donations from participating area funeral homes eliminate that cost. “In the city hospital in Bombay, if you don’t have something the patient can afford — they’re dead,” Mascarenhas says. He is a partner in Coventry Cardiology Associates, with offices in Easton and Phillipsburg, and a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Drexel University. “These people are so...

They might want to check the batteries first. Second-hand pacemakers from dead Americans are being cleaned up and implanted into heart patients in the Third World. And according to doctors the practice is 'very safe and effective'. The pacemakers - small devices which use electrical impulses to regulate the beating of the heart - have been inserted into 53 patients in India who had severe heart rhythm disorders called heart block and sick sinus syndrome.

Really? THE FACTS A much-noted study last year raised more than a few eyebrows when it suggested that digital music players could set hearts aflutter — by interfering with pacemakers. The study, published in the journal Heart Rhythm, found that all it took to cause electrical interference in an implanted pacemaker was holding an iPod two inches from a patient’s chest. In some cases, the study found, an iPod caused interference when it was held within 18 inches of a patient. But many scientists were skeptical, and apparently for good reason. More recent studies that looked at music players have...

How listening to an iPod could stop your pacemaker workingBy DANIEL MARTIN - More by this author » Last updated at 23:27pm on 11th May 2007  Ipods can cause pacemakers to malfunction by making them go too fast, too slow or even stop altogether, according to a study. Researchers found that iPods could make pacemakers malfunction by interfering with the electromagnetic equipment monitoring the heart rate. As a result, the pacemaker was unable to effectively monitor how fast the heart was beating, making it unable to regulate its speed. The study may concern the increasing number of older people...

IPODS can kill people who use cardiac implantable pacemakers by interfering with the electromagnetic equipment monitoring the heart, according to a report on Reuters.

President Bush will deliver his annual State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress tonight at 6 PM Pacific time. A live webcast is available here. According to CNN, quoting a top aide, "President Bush will present 'a strategy for success' in Iraq and outline details of his Social Security proposal." Judge Michael Chertoff testified during his nomination to become Homeland Security Secretary before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. President Bush plans a late February trip to Europe to seek additional assistance from the European Union and NATO in Iraq, and to meet...

CASES It was 5:30 in the morning. I noticed an elderly man being whizzed into the emergency department on a stretcher. What was unusual were his movements. He seemed to occupy a fourth dimension, oscillating in several directions at the same time. The year was 1956, and I was a fledgling intern, working in the emergency room at a hospital in New York, trying to survive the 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift. This was my first encounter with a patient who was having continuous convulsions, and I was stunned into inaction. Finally, I was dislocated from my paralysis by...