X-Message-Number: 15459 From: Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 13:55:54 EST Subject: new topic: treating enlarged hearts?Also comments on vitrification discussions --part1_f3.6eb8cc5.27a3223a_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This may be a bit off topic, but I have a friend who has recently been diagnosed with an enlarged heart, left ventricle, with dilated blood vessels in that ventricle. He's told its a bad prognosis, that he may need a heart transplant to survive- of course the best of those only last ten years. My friend is 57. I'm urging him to consider Cryonics Institute, for price reasons I think that is his best option. If anyone has any info about treatments for this sort of condition, please let me know, esp if you can point me to a source or medical facility. I've heard of some doctor in South America who sections or staples the heart, increasing pumping capacity. I've also heard that there is a procedure for drilling holes into the muscle of the left ventricle to allow oxygen rich blood to perfuse the muscle. I've also heard of stem cell research that may be beneficial for repairing this sort of damage. (Obviously that is a few years off) I'm not a med professional, so I'm not up on the exact sites to search. Any pointers would be much appreciated. I'm p.s., I'm learning a lot via the Ettinger driven vitrification discussions. I'm glad to see a (generally) healthy discourse on the procedures, and I'm especially interested in independent labs verifying the test materials and results. Even if there have been few standards in the past, or they have varied, would it not be a great idea to have at the next major cryonics gathering a development of protocols/testing defined to enable everyone to measure benchmarks in improvement? ie, how toxic is some chemical, what concentrations are needed, how successful is the vitrification, how fast do patients need to be cooled, how easy is the application in real world conditions? And, what are the test procedures a lab uses to verify these results? Also, any particular procedure could be verified for practicality- does it help, does it work, is it likely to make a difference? It could be called the Ettinger Scale of Cryonic Preservation. Okay, I'm a bit tongue in cheek, but doesn't it make sense to have a Cryonics Standards Institute, seminar or such meeting? What is that organization- The American National Standards Institute? How do they run or determine procedures? That might provide a benchmark for a similar effort in the cryonics movement... and, could lead to QUICKER advancements in the application of new technology and development of a true " suspended animation" technique. Okay, we're up in the blue sky territory now, but its so odd to me that although cryonics is striving towards a goal, that goal is not clearly defined with benchmarks along the way to the goal. Okay, I'm done. Thanks for listening! --part1_f3.6eb8cc5.27a3223a_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15459