CBS news Healtwatch reports on a new experimental technique that could save thousands of lives for those suffering from Heart Failure.

Usually, the only option available for heart failure patients in the advanced stages of the disease is a heart transplant. However, with limited hearts available for transplants and tens of thousands of patients often the patient dies waiting for a heart. This is what happened to my wife’s father, his heart failure the result of a heart virus.

From the CBS article:

…Delong’s heart was failing and was so enlarged that “you could actually see my shirt moving from my own heart, that’s how bad my heart was,” Delong says.

Doctors told her that a transplant would be necessary, assuming they could find a donor heart. Then, they suggested a different approach.

“Over the past five years, the use of mechanical heart pumps has revolutionized the care of some patients with heart failure,” Dr. Simon Maybaum, of the Montefiore Medical Center, says.

Monique had a mechanical heart pump implanted that took over the work of her left ventricle, letting it rest and heal.

But, like other muscles, resting the heart too much will make it weak.

“One suggestion that we had offered them too much of a good thing – that we had rested the heart too much and that it, indeed, had become lazy,” Maybaum says.

Doctors also gave Delong a drug, Clenbuterol, used to treat asthma in Europe. The drug has the added side effect of stimulating muscle to become bigger and stronger. That, combined with conventional heart failure drugs, led to a remarkable finding in a previous British study.

“Two-thirds of those patients had complete recovery of their heart function, to the degree that their heart pumps could be taken out,” Maybaum says. “When followed for up to a period of four years, [they] had stable heart function and [came] off all medications.”

Delong’s heart recovered so well that, two weeks ago, doctors were able to remove her artificial heart pump.

“I feel great, I feel alive again,” Delong says. “I can walk better, [and] I ran up the stairs for the first time in years.”

Monique is the first patient in a new study to recover enough to have her heart pump removed. The multi-center trial is designed to show that this combination drug-and-pump approach is allowing heart failure patients to get better.