June 21, 2012 | 11:01 AM |

First Total Artificial Heart Implant In New England: The Video

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, artificial heart, Brigham & Women's Hospital, surgery

http://vimeo.com/44387011

Brigham and Women’s Hospital announced this morning that surgeons implanted the first total artificial heart in New England.

The Boston Globe reports:

The first total artificial heart implant in New England was performed last February on a 66-year-old retired high school teacher and track and field coach from the South Shore, who was diagnosed last year with a rapidly deteriorating condition that would have caused total heart failure.

The artificial heart that James Carelli received at Brigham and Women’s Hospital is intended as a bridge to a human heart transplant. Doctors diagnosed Carelli with cardiac senile amyloidosis, and they determined that his only option for survival was to receive the artificial heart while he awaits the transplant, according to an e-mail the hospital’s president, Betsy Nabel, sent Thursday morning to staff. He is on the waiting list for a heart transplant, as well as a kidney transplant.

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →

  • Anonymous

    According to SynCardia, tha maker of the device implanted in Mr.Carelli, over 1000 such operations have been done around the world.  There are currently 34 centers in the US certified to perform this surgery (plus 33 elsewhere in the world).  While this is clearly great news for Mr. Carelli and a successful, complex operation, why is this story getting big headlines?  And why did the Brigham keep this under wraps for 4 months? Maybe it has something to do with producing a slick promotional video at a time when Partners Health Care is under pressure about its high prices and no evidence that their quality is any better than several other excellent MA hospitals?