Patients with irregular heart rhythm had scares that resulted from infection or had heart attacks. In each of the patient, the electrical system that ensured that their hearts beat normally had already short-circuited. Some of the patients suffer from rapid heartbeats that result in sudden deaths. This condition is the most common cause of deaths in America and sees America losing about 325,000 of its population each year. All those who passed on had indeed exhausted all the possible treatments. Researchers from the Washington University located in St. Louis came in handy. They decided to offer the patients some investigation treatment. They induced some short bursts of radiation to the patients’ heart with the aim of destroying all the cells that stood in the way of the electric system working. The results of this research were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday. The experiment seemed to have been productive, giving hope to people who had been left with no alternative but to have a heart transplant.
The former president of Heart Rhythm Society and a professor of medicine at the University of California, Dr. Melvin Scheinman, called the experiment a game changer, saying that there is no doubt that it will be practiced. The newly discovered treatment should not be conducted on cardiac patients who need immediate attention because it takes up some weeks to become fully effective. Efforts to look into the method in a more significant number of patients have already begun. Dr. Roderick Tung of the University of Chicago Medicine says that the worst that can happen is adopting the study without critiquing it and only come to learn of its side effects after a decade or so. Patients used in this study had initially used drugs to control their heart rates, but the drugs failed.
Within 90 days before the five patients took the experimental treatment, they had suffered over 6,500 bouts of abnormal heart rates. The patients recovered from the procedure after a month. After the treatment, they only got four tachycardia in a year, while two did not get any at all. The experimental method became possible because there was the amalgamation of two techniques namely stereotactic radiation that uses an intense beam of radiation to destroy tumors, and a technique that points out the exact location of the scar. The scars were said to range from the size of a cherry to that of a walnut.