Talk:Artificial cardiac pacemaker

Timeline

I'm trying to create a timeline for the history of artificial pacemakers:

1954 - First cardiac pacemaker stimulates a human heart - Used skin electrodes, caused skin burns.

1955 - Dr. Paul Zoll, MD, developed a pulse generator that stimulates the heart. Manufactured as the PM-65 by Electrodyne, it was intended for use as emergency support during cardiac surgery.

1957 - After a power outage caused a PM-65 to stop functioning, Dr. C. Walton Lillehei asked Earl Bakken to create a device that worked on batteries. This prototype lead to the 5800 line of pacemakers by Medtronic, the first wearable external pacemaker. This device was also the first with implantable internal electrodes.

1958/Oct/8 - Under the direction of Dr. Åke Senning, Rune Elmqvist developed the first fully implantable pacemaker. The first implantation was performed on a Swedish man named Arne Larsson. He was 43 y/o at the time, and suffered from life-threatening Stokes-Adams seizures. (The first device worked for three hours. A second one was inserted the next day, which worked for a couple of weeks. In 1971 Mr. Larsson got a device that worked well. Mr. Larsson lived a long and full life until his death on December 28, 2001. Over his lifetime, Mr. Larsson received a total of 22 pacemakers over 43 years.) The power supply for this first pacemaker was two NiCad battery cells which were rechared from the outside by a coil. The battery cells and the silicon transistors were encased in an epoxy resin. The entire pacemaker device (excluing leads) measured 55mm diameter by 16mm thickness.

1959/May/19 - First long term transvenous pacing wire used. A 67 year old male with high degree heart block underwent insertion of a transvenous lead via cephalic vein cut down. The transvenous wire was attached to an externalized pacing system via the skin incision. The pacing system was able to sense native ventricular activity, but was not able to inhibit pacing output based on sensed activity. The gentleman was discharged from the hospital on June 23, 1959. Because the pacing lead exited through the skin, the skin site required frequently infected. However he never developed a systemic infection due to the pacing system. After using the device for 41 months, he underwent implantation of a completely internal pacemaker system on November 8, 1962. He died 20 days later due to complications from the surgery.

1959 - Dr. William Chardack and Dr. Andrew Gage at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Buffalo, N.Y., working with William Greatbatch (an electrical engineer), developed the (first) a fully implantable pacemaker using primary cells as a power source.

1960/Feb/3 - Orestes Fiandra MD and Roberto Rubio MD implanted the first pacemaker in the Western Hemisphere in a 40 year old woman with complete heart block and syncopal episodes. The device worked for the 9 months that the patient survived her other ailments. The device was designed in cooperation with, and produced by, Rune Elmqvist.

1960/Jun/6 - Chardack, Gage and Greatbatch implanted a self-contained, completely internal pacemaker powered by a non-rechargeable mercury zinc oxide batteries, in Buffalo, USA. The patient died 2 years later of unrelated causes.

1960/Jul - Greatbatch files for a patent on the implantable pacemaker. It is granted(!)in 1962.

1960 - Medtronic creates (first)a long-term implantable pacemaker system

1974 - Plutonium battery devices in use.

References:

http://www.naspe.org/ep-history/timeline/

http://www.medtronic.com/corporate/history.html

http://www.bae.ncsu.edu/bae/courses/bae465/1995_projects/scho/htmls/history1.html

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blcardiac.htm

Article name

Isn't "artificial pacemaker" redundant? Shouldn't this article be at Heart pacemaker or something like that? RickK | Talk 02:50, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The first sentence covers that. The heart contains natural pacemaker cells, described at Cardiac pacemaker. -- Cyrius|&#9998 03:28, Apr 6, 2004 (UTC)

There is some "first"-words that can be removed when discussing Greatbatch. I have put them in parenthesis above. This as the swedish device was really the first to be implanted, and that the Uruguay one was the first long-live one. I also added some details about the Swedish devices. The development of these devices continued, and pacemakers are still being produced and developed in Sweden, now under the name of St. Jude Medical Inc. One of their products is the worlds smallest pacemaker.

Ake Senning and Rune Elmqvist did also present their pacemaker design on a conferance in 1959, but I have misplaced the reference. Will add it when I find it.

Power consumption

What's the typical power consumption of an artificial pacemaker? 193.171.121.30 00:58, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Possible copyvio?

The text at the end of the page seems to be copied directly from the middle part of [1], ?s and all (before I corrected the ?s into 's anyway). However, it also appears in some other pages in the google cache, such as [2] (currently 404'd at the original url) The text was added in [3] by 144.15.16.71, which has no other contributions. Should this be removed, or has authorization for the use of this text been given at some time in the past? -- bd_ 00:17, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• I removed it. Osmodiar 06:56, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)