Researchers use heart attacks to cure patients

HOUSTON (Reuter) - Physicians said Thursday they were experimenting with a technique to induce a small heart attack in patients to cure their heart problems.

The method involves injecting ethanol, or pure alcohol, into enlarged hearts to kill excess tissue, thereby reducing strain on the organ, they said.

The originator of the technique, Ulrich Sigwart of Britain's Royal Brompton Hospital, assisted heart specialists Robert Roberts and William Spencer here Thursday when they performed it for the first time on a U.S. patient, a 33-year-old woman.

They said the woman was in good condition and her heart beating strongly.

Sigwart said the procedure has been done on about 100 patients in Europe, Canada and Asia since he began using it 2 ½ years ago. "The success rate has been very high," he said.

The hope is that it will be a tool that physicians can use instead of surgery to help patients with enlarged hearts, or cardiomyopathy.

"I found the idea appealing to create a small heart attack selectively in the area where we had too much muscle and do in essence the same thing as is being done by surgery," he said.

"It's much less invasive. You don't have to open the chest," Sigwart said of the procedure.

Sigwart said the alcohol did not enter the patient's bloodstream, therefore there were no intoxicating effects. But, he said, the procedure was not without pain.

"It hurts to get alcohol into the heart," he said.
Roberts, head of cardiology at Houston's Methodist Hospital, said several milliliters of alcohol were injected into a specific region of the heart through a catheter fed into the body through the left main coronary artery.

It kills heart tissue -- which is what happens during a heart attack because of lack of bloodflow -- but only in parts of the heart selected by the physician.

Enlarged hearts, or cardiomyopathy, work harder to pump blood. The procedure reduces the heart's size and increases its pumping pressure, which eases the strain on the heart, Roberts said.

Cardiomyopathy is often the cause of sudden death in athletes, who develop the condition because of a genetic abnormality, Roberts said.

He said in the United States sudden death occured more often in the South because athletes working out in the warm climate tended to become dehydrated, which in combination with cardiomyopathy, could be fatal.

"In many cases, the first symptom they have is sudden death," Roberts said. In others, shortness of breath and chest pain signaled the problem.

Copyright 1996 Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved. The above news report may not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, without the prior written consent of Reuters Ltd.

Jeff Franks, Researchers use heart attacks to cure patients., Reuters, 11-14-1996.