Heart Disease – Battery of Pacemakers

Transcript

“Pacemakers are obviously battery dependent and they’re in your chest and they’re hooked to these wires. And then they pace at different intervals. Some people need the pacer to make every heartbeat for them. Therefore, the battery’s not going to last as long as for those people where every two months, the patient fires four or five times. So depending on how much a person uses the pacer, that person is going to need battery change at some interval. This is why we doctors ask patients to come to the office periodically, or at least assess their pacemaker transtelephonically for those newer generation pacemakers, so that we can get an idea of what the effective replacement time is, or the ERT. And when that pacemaker gets within six months of need for a generator upgrade, we bring them closer at a closer interval and we check the battery life.

And then we set them up to get a new generator. The newer generation pacemakers tend to have longer battery life and greater storage, but still we don’t have a pacemaker that we can charge without replacing that battery. Now you can charge your iPhone. You can charge your devices without connecting to a plug, but we still don’t have that technology for a pacemaker as of yet. Now more recently, we have now an implantable pacemaker that needs no leads so that you don’t have to have a battery under your skin and wires hooked up to the heart. These pacemakers can actually be delivered through the vein into the heart and actually be inserted in the heart muscle such that it fires without any wire, additional wiring or any additional hardware.”