Mending a Broken HeartEssay Heart is the mostimportant part of the body and the key of blood circulation.
It is locatedbeneath the sternum and is about the size of our fist. The heart beats averageseventy beats per minute and pumps about 5 liters of blood per minute, or totalvolume of blood in the human body each minute. Humans are notable to live without hearts and many scientists have been focusing on how tomend a broken heart. There are fourheart replacement technologies that are most well-known to modern science:Human Heart Donation, Xenotransplantation, Tissue Engineering, and ArtificialHeart. Each method has saved many lives who suffered or could die from themalfunction heart.
To begin with, Iwould like to discuss about ‘Human Heart Donation’. This method, as the namesuggests, is replacing the malfunction heart with donor’s heart which isdonated from charity or possibly individual volunteers. As such, the situations can be when othertreatments for errors in the heart have not worked, leading to heart failure inthe future. When the operation of heart transportation is done, you will beable to recover after the operation in just a few weeks although you will beweak at the beginning. It is also very crucial to have simple activities tostrengthen your body and health; “pushing, pulling or heavy lifting until yourbreastbone is fully healed.” (Bhf.
org.uk, 2018) Second heartreplacement technology is ‘Xenotransplantation’. As the prefix, ‘Xeno-‘ meansalien, strange and guest, this technology, unlike from ‘Human Heart Donation’, is”any procedure that involves the transplantation, implantation or infusion intoa human recipient of either live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhumananimal source.
” (Fda.gov, 2018) This technology was developed by the fact thatthe need for the human organs far exceeds the current low supply. Toelaboration on, there are advantages of ‘Xenotransplantation’ not onlyincreasing the supply but also the therapeutic use. The technology can play ahuge role in certain diseases such as diabetes and neurodegenerative disorders,in situation where human materials are not usually available. On the other hand,there are some disadvantages. Recipients might be infected by unrecognizedinfectious agents and tremendous spread of infection through their closecontacts or into the huge human population. By statement from FDA, theycommented that “Moreover, infectious agents may not be readily identifiablewith current techniques.
” (Fda.gov, 2018) Not only that there are some issuesregarding infection but also ethical issues about the ‘Xenotransplantation’ whichwill be discussed soon. Third of all, there is atechnology called, ‘Tissue Engineering’. As heart muscle disease has beenconsidered a tipping point for progression to heart failure. National staticsindicates that there are over five million people damaged by heart failure eachyear and about three hundred thousand deaths.
Moreover, the fully-grown heartmuscle cells cannot divide into injured cells. The scar tissues result into areaof damaged myocardium. Thus, the best approach to solve this issue is to avoidsuch scar formation or simply replace the formed scar tissue with functioningcardiac muscle tissue. On the contrary, there are limitations due to short lengthof cell life and poor cellular integration
