Adrian Kantrowitz

Adrian Kantrowitz (born October 4, 1918 in New York City , † November 14, 2008 in Ann Arbor , Michigan ) was an American heart surgeon. He was the second surgeon in the world to perform a heart transplant. Kantrowitz developed an early pacemaker (the first to be commercially available) and other devices and prostheses used in cardiology, including the intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) and the left ventricular assist system (LVAD).

Life

Kantrowitz was the son of a clinic director in the Bronx and a costume designer who designed, among others, the Ziegfeld Follies . He majored in mathematics at New York University (Bachelor 1940) and then medicine at Long Island College of Medicine (now SUNY Downstate Medical Center), where he received his MD in 1943. In his internship at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn, he first wanted to become a neurosurgeon, but after his military service he switched to cardiac surgery due to a lack of training positions for neurosurgeons. He was a field surgeon in the US Army for two years during World War II and made it to a major.

After the war he continued his residency at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, where he was from 1948 and became chief resident. During his time at Montefiore Hospital, he was also a fellow at the Medical College of Case Western Reserve University for two years . From 1955 to 1970 he was at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. From 1955 to 1964 he was head of cardiovascular surgery and from 1964 of surgery (director of surgical services). After he was already an instructor for surgery at New York Medical College in 1952, he became assistant professor for surgery at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNY) at the Downtown Medical Center in 1955 , from 1964 with a full professorship.

Tension arose with the management of Maimonides Hospital in 1970 when public opinion turned against heart transplants due to a series of unsuccessful operations. Kantrowitz moved his entire 25-person team, including nurses and technicians, and his $ 3 million research funding to the Sinai Hospital in Detroit (now Sinai Grace Hospital). There he was also professor of surgery at Wayne State University Medical School. He headed surgery there until 1975, from 1975 to 1983 he headed cardiac surgery and from 1983 to 1993 surgical research. He officially retired in 1993, but continued to work for a few years.

In 2001 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs.

He had been married to Jean Rosensaft since 1947, who was in the administration of the Maimonides Medical Center laboratory. Together they founded a company for medical cardiology devices (LVAD Technology) in 1983. He had two daughters (one became a cardiologist and one radiologist) and a son who became a neurosurgeon.

plant

As a teenager, Kantrowitz built his own electrocardiogram machine from radio parts. From the beginning of the 1950s he developed medical devices such as artificial heart parts and a heart-lung machine that was used in an operation on a boy in 1958. In 1951, during his experimental operations on animals, he made the first films of open hearts (such as the opening and closing of the mitral valve , filmed during experiments with dogs), which he screened to 350 doctors at the New York Academy of Sciences on October 16, 1951.

In the early 1960s, he developed one of the first pacemakers in collaboration with General Electric . They were first implanted in 1961.

With his brother Arthur Kantrowitz (a physicist) he developed artificial heart parts such as an artificial pump, the left ventricular assist system, Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD). The first patient to whom they implanted it in 1966 only survived one day (he died of pre-existing liver damage), the second two weeks. In 1971 he implanted a partially artificial heart in a patient who survived three months and was the first patient treated in this way to leave hospital. At the end of the 1950s, Kantrowitz also experimented with a booster heart by implanting parts of the peritoneum, which synchronized with the heart via a radio signal, as support for the natural heart. He demonstrated this in dogs in 1959, but refrained from using it in humans because he thought it was premature. As early as 1954, he and others developed an artificial heart valve.

With his brother, he also developed the intra-aortic balloon pump . It goes back to developments in the 1950s when Kantrowitz discovered in 1953 that increasing arterial diastolic pressure in dogs increased blood flow to the heart by 22 to 53 percent. The idea arose to relieve the heart in the event of a heart attack by counter pumping (less blood flow in systole, more in diastole). In 1961 RH Clauss developed a corresponding machine, which operated with blood flow outside the body, and in 1962 SD Moulopoulos developed a balloon that was inserted into the artery and pumped up and down synchronized with the ECG. Kantrowitz developed this further and first applied the procedure to a patient in 1967. In the 1980s, the procedure became generally accepted in emergency medicine in the United States because it was relatively straightforward to use and only required local anesthesia.

In the mid-1960s, he was also in a race with Christiaan Barnard in South Africa for the first heart transplant , on which he and his department had been experimenting on dogs for around five years. He wanted to perform the operation on a baby as early as June 1966, but the organ donor was not declared brain dead in time. Barnard preceded him on December 3, 1967, and Kantrowitz followed on December 6 with the first heart transplant in the United States, performed on a 19-day-old baby who would otherwise have died of a congenital heart defect. It only survived 6 hours. Other US surgeons who performed early heart transplants at the time were Michael DeBakey , Denton Cooley , Norman Shumway, and Richard Lower (Medical College of Virginia).

Kantrowitz was also inventive outside of cardiology. During his specialist training in neurosurgery, he invented a new bracket for skull openings and in 1961 he was the first to experiment with electronic signals for muscle stimulation (in experiments with dogs), later used on paraplegic patients. He also invented a device that enabled paralyzed patients to empty their bladders via a radio signal.

Web links

• Obituary in the New York Times
• Obituary in the Independent

swell

1. ^ Obituary in The Independent
2. ^ Obituary in The Independent
3. ^ JE McGee: Intra-aortic balloon pump: a perspective. In: Journal of the National Medical Association. Volume 73, Number 9, September 1981, pp. 885-887, PMID 7277524 , PMC 2552747 (free full text).
4. ↑ According to other versions, his team stopped him in the operating room due to ethical concerns. Obituary for Richard Lower, The Guardian