AP Features, December 4th, 2007
The world's longest surviving artificial heart patient, who was saved by a pioneering heart pump, has died, a friend said Monday. He was 68.
In 2000, Peter Houghton's heart was so badly weakened by a heart attack sustained five years earlier that he had been given only weeks to live, and he agreed to receive a permanently implanted experimental heart pump.
He died Nov. 25 from multiple organ malfunction, his friend and neighbor John Lloyd said. The seven years he spent on the pump amounted to the longest time anyone has lived with any type of artificial heart device.
"Peter was a great guy. He lived the last seven years to the full," said Lloyd, who is a regional executive for Heart Research UK, the charity that funded Houghton's pioneering pump.
"Peter saw it as his extra life and he did what he could. Both Peter and I traveled to America together and did a tour around the heart centers. We traveled thousands of miles."
Houghton, who fostered children with his wife Diane, used his time to write books, hike the Swiss Alps and campaign for long-term treatment such as the pump for heart-failure patients. He became the chairman of the Heart Failure Foundation before his condition began to deteriorate a year ago.
"Peter traveled thousands of miles highlighting the work of the charity," Lloyd said. "In my opinion, he would have lasted longer if he had not tried to be so active.
"He worked and did what he thought he should do. He had been given an opportunity and he wanted to make sure other people could get the opportunity as well."
The length of time Houghton managed to survive with the device was "really amazing," said Dr. Timothy J. Gardner, president-elect of the American Heart Association, who also praised Houghton's outreach activities.
"When you come to the brink of death and are brought back, and are tethered to a machine but are still willing to talk about it ... I think it's a pretty remarkable and altruistic thing to do, and really admired him for that," said Gardner, who is also a heart surgeon. "He's one of the first people to really validate that you can live a satisfactory, near normal, life with this kind of device taking care of your heart action."
Houghton was implanted with the thumb-sized Jarvik 2000 at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford in June 2000.
The device, made by the New York-based Jarvik Heart Inc., is a titanium and steel, valveless pump that fits directly into the heart's left ventricle and continuously pushes blood throughout the body. It weighs about 3.2 ounces (90 grams).
A small cable comes out through the abdominal wall and connects to a small battery and controller. The pump was created by Dr. Robert Jarvik, who also invented the first permanently implantable artificial heart.
Gardner noted that, unlike earlier, bulkier machines, the device was made to complement, rather than replace, a weakened heart.
"Strictly speaking, it's a heart assist pump, not an artificial heart," Gardner said. "It takes over up to 80 percent of the pumping action of the failed heart."
Versions of the device, which have already seen use in Europe, are still being studied in the U.S., Gardner said.
Houghton's funeral will take place in Birmingham, in central England, on Thursday.
