How Doctors Are Mending Broken Hearts

Rapid and more effective treatments at specialist cardiology centers are curbing Europe's No. 1 killer.

- Susannah Hickling

ROD GAMBLE’S FATHER DIED OF A HEART ATTACK at 59, and there were signs that Rod too might not live to see old age when he developed life-threatening cardiac rhythm problems in his early sixties. But thanks to ever-improving heart treatments, the retired parcel distribution company manager from Scunthorpe in the United Kingdom is still fit and active at 72.

After the self-declared “sports fanatic” collapsed twice while playing golf in 2008, doctors diagnosed an abnormally slow heartbeat. They fitted him with a pacemaker that delivered electrical impulses to stimulate his heart to beat at a normal speed. Rod came to be totally reliant on the device, which sat just under the skin beneath his left collarbone with a wire leading through a blood vessel to the heart.

But the pacemaker was not without its problems. It had to be replaced after six weeks when the pacing wire moved, and then Rod developed an infection after the battery—worn out from being used at 100 per cent capacity to keep him alive—had to be replaced in September 2014.

“Early one Sunday morning I got up to go to the bathroom,” he remembers. “I felt something running down my chest.” To his horror he saw that the infection had split the pacemaker scar wide open, the wire was hanging out and pus was oozing out of an inch wide wound.

The infection meant that a simple replacement was out of the question but in June 2015 a new kind of pacemaker came to his rescue. The Micra Transcatheter Pacing System was the world’s smallest, a tenth of the size of a standard device, but, even better, it would be implanted into the heart itself, making it wireless and invisible. “When I saw it, I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “It was like a bullet with tiny hooks!”