Posted on Thursday, 7th October 2010 by Brooke Richmond

Chuck Cummings loves to show off photos of his glory days in the Navy.  He managed to stay healthy and active until a few years ago when he was diagnosed with heart failure.

“I used to like to wash the car, and by the time I was done washing the car, I was too tired to do the interior,” he said.

His blood pressure was too high, preventing his heart from pumping enough blood to the rest of his body. That’s when his wife Anne found a clinical trial to “hot wire” his heart.

“Well I guess my wife must like me because she wanted to keep me around and she started searching the Internet,” said Chuck.

Chuck was the first heart failure patient to have the device implanted.  Surgeons insert a battery pack — no bigger than an iPod — under the collarbone and place electrodes around the carotid artery in the neck. When the pack pulses, the electrodes stimulate the artery, telling the brain to relax the heart so it can pump properly.

“It’s like a switch, on and off,” said Dr. Fadi Matar, Director, Cardiac Care Unit at Tampa General Hospital.

In an earlier trial to combat high blood pressure alone, patients on average lowered their numbers from 180 over 158 — to 105 over 87, in three months.

“What we’re trying to do is improve the quality of life without necessarily taking tons of pills because medications, they have their own side effects,” said Dr. Matar.

After three months, Chuck is off his heart medications and hopes to keep it that way.

“I seem to have a little more energy. I can be on my feet longer, do more,” he said.

The heart failure clinical trial is only taking place at a limited number of sites nationwide so far; however the High-Blood Pressure Study is still recruiting patients at Swedish Medical Center.

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