Where are we with the Carmat prototype after the half-fig, half-grape assessments of the first two locations? The third patient implanted on April 8 doing well? While few details have filtered so far on the experiments with artificial heart prosthesis, Professors Carpentier, Latrémouille and Duveau provide some answers in an article published in The Lancet.
In this publication in the form of a report, renowned cardiologists, stakeholders in the project, say more about the circumstances of the deaths of the first two patients, which occurred 74 and 270 days after the operation.
The first prosthesis had been implanted on a 76-year-old patient, but the latter had died 74 days after the transplant, at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital following the accidental shutdown of the machine. The second patient, implanted in August 2014, had managed to live with the Carmat heart until May 2015, before succumbing to the Nantes University Hospital after being hospitalized for circulatory failure. The reasons for his death had remained unclear until now.
In the Lancet article, cardiac surgeons explain that the two deaths were caused by electronic component failures (and not mechanical failures of bio-prostheses). Dysfunctions that were identified and subsequently corrected, points out the publication, taken up by AFP.
With this information, the professors swept aside the thesis of the formation of a blood clot which could have blocked the prosthesis to the point of causing the death of the two patients.
As for the third patient, we just know that he is in rehabilitation. “He is almost out of heart failure disease,” says Christian Latrémouille to Pourquoi Doctor.
Overall, cardiologists remain very optimistic about what will happen next and do not intend to stop there. The Carmat heart could benefit 100,000 patients with end-stage heart failure if ongoing clinical trials are successful.
