Volume 2
WHAT’Snew
Number 2
March 1, 2013
Pennsylvania Hospital
LASSO IT UP: How a Rodeo Roping Technique Can Help Treat an Age-old Heart Ailment / / /
At first pass, lariat seems like just a hifalutin’ word for the more down-to-earth, lasso — a long, noosed rope. For most, either word will bring to mind images of cowboys and rodeos, not human hearts. However, thanks to a new technology making its way onto the medical scene, lariat has a new meaning and is helping to treat the most common of cardiac arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation. Let’s take a few steps back though, before we make the leap from rodeo ring to hospital.
INSIDE Lasso It Up continued...............2 Helping a Beloved PAH Family Member.................2 Having Fun While Raising Funds at Pennsylvania Hospital’s First “Souper Bowl”..........................3 Development News...............4-5 Swift, Non-Surgical Help to Fix Newborn Ear Deformities...6 Tonya Johnson New Clinial Director..................7 New Faces in Quality Department...................7 What’s Happening.....................8
Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is an irregular heartbeat that feels like a fluttering or quivering of the heart that affects close to three million Americans. According to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, when AFib occurs, rapid, disorganized electrical signals cause the heart’s two upper chambers to fibrillate, or contract very quickly and irregularly. AFib causes blood to pool in the upper chambers of the heart. This keeps the heart from pumping blood completely into the heart’s two lower chambers. While for some, the symptoms of AFib can feel very frightening, others have no signs at all. But symptomatic or not, make no mistake about it: AFib is not a simple “heart flutter” and certainly not something to ignore. The biggest threat from atrial fibrillation is the threat of blood clots and stroke. “Patients with atrial fibrillation are six times more at risk of having a stroke and 15 to 20 percent of all strokes a year are related to AFib,” said Daniel J. McCormick, DO, FACC, FSCAI, an interventional cardiologist at Pennsylvania Hospital. “This is not only significant from a direct health care standpoint, but a societal one as well since stroke is one of the biggest drivers of disability and health care costs in the U.S.”
The standard treatment for AFib is the use of anticoagulants, more commonly known as blood thinners, such as warfarin, and heparin. While there will always be a need for blood thinners in medicine, the truth is, their effectiveness is precisely what makes them so dangerous. Warfarin, the most commonly used for example, is also used to poison rats and mice. Its anticlotting properties produce death through internal hemorrhaging — a trait you want to control rodent populations, not your AFib. This is why warfarin is considered a “black box drug” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The black box is the strictest warning the FDA can give a medicine while still permitting it to remain on the market. According to Dr. McCormick, patients on blood thinners must be monitored weekly to make sure their medication levels are safe, which limits one’s mobility and quality of life. Striking a balance between effective, therapeutic levels of blood thinners and hazardous ones is delicate and requires constant diligence on part of both the patient and physician — a level of diligence many patients aren’t capable of maintaining. “Even with careful monitoring only about 20 percent of all patients on warfarin are within the proper range at any one given time,”
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Penn Medicine Teams Up .......8
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