Lowering Blood Pressure – Saving Lives
Reported March 12, 2008
ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — Seventy-two-million people in the United States have high blood pressure — a potentially dangerous condition that can lead to a stroke or heart attack. For many, it means changing their habits and taking medications every day. But now, doctors are testing a new approach — a device designed to work with the body’s own mechanisms, to bring blood pressure down.
Last year, George Curtis’s high blood pressure gave him the scare of his life.
“Woke up one morning just couldn’t breathe. My wife took me to the hospital,” Curtis says.
His blood pressure spiked as high as 250 over 150!
“My blood pressure stayed so high I know eventually something’s going to happen,” Curtis says.
When ten different blood pressure medications couldn’t bring his blood pressure down, doctors offered another option: Curtis became one of the first patients in the United States to be implanted with an experimental device, programmed by computer to work with the body’s natural mechanism for regulating blood pressure.
“If it goes up, it’s supposed to bring it down, if it goes too low, it’s supposed to bring it up,” Curtis says.
The device is implanted under Curtis’ skin, near his collar bone. Wires follow the right and left carotid arteries in the neck, so the device can send energy to activate the baroreceptors — the body’s natural blood pressure regulator.
As part of the clinical trial, Curtis still takes blood pressure medication, but he believes the implant is what’s brought his blood pressure down.
“Before it was like 200 over 110 most of the time, now I’m hittin’ 125 over 77,” Curtis says.
In clinical trials in Europe, more than 80-percent of patients showed significantly lower blood pressure after one year. Curtis’ doctor is hopeful he’ll see the same results.
“It holds out the hope we may have a device that can avoid all the side effects of drugs and enable us to control blood pressure,” says H.B. Karunaratne, M.D., a cardiologist at Florida Hospital in Orlando, Fla.
With every day, Curtis says he feels better and stronger.
Researchers are still recruiting volunteers for this blood pressure device study. Patients must be under age 80, with systolic pressure over 160, diastolic pressure over 80. And they must be on at least two blood pressure medications and a diuretic.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Clinical Research Study Information Line
(866) 518-8478
http://www.rheosstudy.com