The Keesler Medical Center at Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi, became the first Air Force hospital to implant the world’s smallest pacemaker in a patient with bradycardia, according to an Air Force news release.
Bradycardia is a heart condition that can be "similar to driving a car without an accelerator," explained Lt. Col. (Dr.) Matthew Hann, an interventional cardiologist with the 81st Medical Operations Squadron. "You can coast along very slowly, but when it comes time to climb a hill, you don’t have an accelerator to get the RPMs up to climb the hill, and a heart rate is the same way. If [your] heart rate is too low you don't have the energy to do activities you once enjoyed."
Individuals with bradycardia have an irregular or slow heartbeat that is typically below 60 beats per minute. Because of this, the patients will experience fatigue, dizziness, shortness of breath, and/or fainting spells due to an insufficient amount of oxygen-rich blood being pumped throughout the body. If bradycardia doesn't cause such symptoms, it usually isn't treated. But if it does, the condition is generally treated with a pacemaker that emits electrical impulses to speed up the heart rate and restore a normal rhythm.
The device used April 13, the Micra Transcatheter Pacing System, provides patients with the most advanced technology at one-tenth the size of a traditional pacemaker. It's about the size of a vitamin, small enough to be delivered through a catheter and implanted entirely within the heart using small tines, leaving the patient with a cosmetically invisible pacemaker that does not possess the complications associated with lead wires.
"Keesler cardiology has always been very advanced in our practices," Hann said in the news release. "We are very fortunate to be one of the first hospitals in the country to offer the smallest pacemaker in the world to our patients here at Keesler and also our Veterans Affairs patients, who extend all the way from the Florida panhandle through to Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana."
Rachael Kalinyak is an editorial intern with Network Solutions.
