HUP patient succeeds with new heart-pumping device

After two weeks of training, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania patient Duke Grant took part in a three-kilometer walk Sunday. But Grant was no ordinary participant. The 43-year-old man has an electrical heart-pumping device and is awaiting a heart transplant at HUP. By walking in the second annual "Dash for Organ Donor Awareness," Grant hoped to publicize the need for organ donors throughout the nation. "I think it's important for someone who's waiting for a heart to be out there," he said. "It's a good way to get the word out." Grant's heart is currently hooked up to a left ventricular "assist device," which has been hailed as the next wave of heart-pumping mechanisms. According to HUP Cardiac Transplant Program Director Michael Acker, a Surgery professor, the Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved the LVAD, but it is in the "investigational" stage. In Philadelphia, only HUP and Temple University's hospital now provide the LVAD to their transplant patients. Acker predicted that the device will become increasingly common in future years. "I think where we'll go from here is once? the safety has been established for people at home, you'll see this same device being used as a permanent assist device forever -- for the life of the patient -- for people who perhaps are not transplant candidates or cannot get a heart," he said. Because the LVAD weighs only two pounds and can easily be transported, it is a vast improvement over the old, heavy heart-pumping device that requires the patient to be connected to bulky machinery. Perhaps the greatest advantage of the LVAD is that in the near future it will allow patients like Grant -- who was the first HUP patient ever to leave the hospital while on a pumping device -- to wait at home for a heart to become available for transplant surgery. This is good news for Grant, who looks forward to going home. "The [HUP] staff is great? but it's still a hospital," he said. "There are a lot more places I would rather be." He expects to be discharged within the next few weeks so that he can wait comfortably with his family until a new heart can be found. Acker noted that "judging from his size and his blood group and the amount of people ahead of him on the waiting list, [Grant] will probably be waiting for another few months." Nationwide, approximately 16,000 Americans under the age of 56 could be helped by a heart transplant, according to the American Heart Association. Because of the high need and urgency of the surgery, medical professionals and organizations like the AHA actively seek organ donors from the nation's healthy population. The Dash -- which included the walk and a 10-kilometer run and was co-sponsored by the University's Medical Center -- was designed as a tool to attract potential donors and demonstrate the success of transplant organizations.