Die Natur hat gerade berichtet, dass ein australischer Mann seit 100 Tagen mit einem Titanherz überlebt hatWährend er auf ein menschliches Spenderherz wartete und sich jetzt gut erholt, nachdem er eines erhalten hat. Wenn eine Person 100 Tage mit einem Titanherz überleben kann, können sie dann so viel länger tun?
Wenn Sie ein Herz hatten, das unzerstörbar war, hält es den Rest von Ihnen nicht auf, zu altern und zu verdorren. Obwohl Herzinsuffizienz die häufigste Todesursache bei Männern ist, wird es etwas anderes irgendwann tun, wenn das Sie nicht versteht.
Wenn Sie jedoch Herzinsuffizienz als Todesursache beseitigen könnten – wie lange könnten Menschen leben? Selbst wenn andere Teile von ihnen gebrechlich sind, wie wäre ihr Leben in den 70ern und 80ern mit perfekten Herzen?
People can now survive 100 days with titanium hearts, if they worked indefinitely – how much might they extend human lifespan?
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
16 Kommentare
Probably be alot more sexy time in the old folks homes…
The heart is „simple“, it’s „just“ a muscle. We’re very far away from working livers or pancreas. We can do kidneys but they are external machines you must plug into very often.
Also note that vascular acidents are caused by high pressure, which causes vessel ruptures. Deaths caused by the actual heart stopping because of age are, well, deaths of old age.
It’d be nice to have a backup heart in case main heart failure.
The question is essentially how much longer would people live if we eliminated heart failure. It would be easy enough to calculate average lifespan with just removing deaths from heart failure.
A quick google estimates around 12 years but I can’t find specific calculations.
How the hell is your body able to carry that? Isn’t titanium heavy or something?
I don’t know, but that would be crazy! I imagine after a certain point, even if you have a good functioning titanium heart, all the other organs would still degrade and either need to be replaced or hooked up to a support system. You’re either a cyborg or stuck in a hospital hooked up to life-support/in need of constant care.
At that point, we should just figure out a way to upload human consciousness to the Matrix.
So a little context on this. Mechanical hearts have been extremely hard to develop for a couple of reasons. One is the size. They have to fit in the space where the heart was (it’s about the size of a fist). They have to pump endlessly for years, all day and all night. They also all tried to occilate like your actual heart does. This is a complicated mechanical mechanism that made the whole device more prone to failure. Also the actual mechanics of an impeller leaves room for blood to clot and damages the red blood cells. You also have foreign body rejection issues.
This new design is kind of brilliant. They use a centrifuge that is magnetically spun. This creates a constant flow. So you don’t have a pulse anymore, but you don’t need one. The mechanism is so simple that it should last for years without failure, and it doesn’t damage or clot the blood. Plus all elements in contact with your cells are biocompatible. (Plastic and titanium). It very likely will be a good candidate for an artificial heart, but it’s still in the testing stages.
They have had LVADs for a while now it doesn’t seem like a great quality of life. Clot risk is high and you have to be connected to a power source. Doesn’t sound like a panacea.
Gotta solve the body constantly trying to reject the artificial parts and we’re there. The problem with all replacement organs right now is the body tries to reject them constantly and the drugs necessary to prevent rejection also make you susceptible to infection from bacteria and viruses and anything else.
Lots of people live without a heart for a while. Some even live for like 5-10 years after a transplant but it’s always basically the same story about what kills them. Solve the rejection issues and maybe we can live forever.
Please don’t give the old fucks in Congress any ideas…
Probably to the age that people without heart failure live. 90-100 tops.
just saying, in most cases heart related problems are in fact problems with blood vessels, so to make it work you need to replace all blood pipes with titanium which will clean itself from the inside rather than heart
but for now even piping in my apartment is not working properly sometimes
So I think as an important initial consideration, this is not an actual replacement for your heart. Not long-term.
I don’t know all the details, but as far as I know this maintains a more or less constant blood flow. Your actual heart does a lot more than that, it responds to homeostatic and biostatic needs of your body. For example, if you have excessive salt, blood pressure will go up in order to increase flow through your kidneys. These things are important, heart rate has to be modulated according to biological needs. Even walking can cause a significant change in heart rate, blood pressure, and blood flow.
So a true artificial heart me too be able to account for all these factors the same way your real heart does. Or similarly at least.
That being said, a fully functional artificial replacement heart would certainly improve the average human lifespan, but it would be unlikely to improve the maximum human lifespan. The cardiovascular death accounts for many deaths, and if you remove that as an option, there is still an upper limit on people’s current life span, which is usually somewhere around 90 or 100 before the body just gives out.
Because there’s a lot of other parts to consider, your kidneys have to stay functional, your liver has to be good, your stomach and digestive system have to not break down. Your brain has to keep functioning, which it does not like to do after a certain point. Eventually, they just start to degrade… People do in fact die from dementia.
So what up the average lifespan but I don’t think it would affect the maximum lifespan. Of course, if we could grow everybody their own custom set of individual organs (with your own DNA so we don’t have to worry about rejection), the body would become a lot more robust… But there are still limits on how long your brain will survive. And I think those limits are not much more than the current lifetime limit which is driven apart by a bodily health.
Maybe we could have the average too 110 or 120 or even 130 if the body was kept incredibly healthy and people were otherwise doing things to keep the brain in good shape… Maybe.
What I’m curious about is rigidity? The heart is an adaptable muscle where is titanium is ofcourse a metal. It could work yes, but is QoL better than lets say a heart grown from tissue.
We have lab grown meat hitting the market, the idea is there to grow a healthy heart from your own stem cells
Hmmm does an artificial heart know when to increase/decrease flow? Like when BPM goes up/down?
Cause i figure, your blood must be constantly be monitored for oxygen levels, and the artificial heart reacts to that measurement.
Its no longer an instinct done by the brain.
How does a mechanical heart respond to increased activity levels and other autonomic feedback situations?