People can now survive 100 days with titanium hearts, if they worked indefinitely – how much might they extend human lifespan?

Probably be alot more sexy time in the old folks homes…

It’d be nice to have a backup heart in case main heart failure.

How the hell is your body able to carry that? Isn’t titanium heavy or something?

So a little context on this. Mechanical hearts have been extremely hard to develop for a couple of reasons. One is the size. They have to fit in the space where the heart was (it’s about the size of a fist). They have to pump endlessly for years, all day and all night. They also all tried to occilate like your actual heart does. This is a complicated mechanical mechanism that made the whole device more prone to failure. Also the actual mechanics of an impeller leaves room for blood to clot and damages the red blood cells. You also have foreign body rejection issues.

This new design is kind of brilliant. They use a centrifuge that is magnetically spun. This creates a constant flow. So you don’t have a pulse anymore, but you don’t need one. The mechanism is so simple that it should last for years without failure, and it doesn’t damage or clot the blood. Plus all elements in contact with your cells are biocompatible. (Plastic and titanium). It very likely will be a good candidate for an artificial heart, but it’s still in the testing stages.

Gotta solve the body constantly trying to reject the artificial parts and we’re there. The problem with all replacement organs right now is the body tries to reject them constantly and the drugs necessary to prevent rejection also make you susceptible to infection from bacteria and viruses and anything else.

Lots of people live without a heart for a while. Some even live for like 5-10 years after a transplant but it’s always basically the same story about what kills them. Solve the rejection issues and maybe we can live forever.

Probably to the age that people without heart failure live. 90-100 tops.

So I think as an important initial consideration, this is not an actual replacement for your heart. Not long-term.

I don’t know all the details, but as far as I know this maintains a more or less constant blood flow. Your actual heart does a lot more than that, it responds to homeostatic and biostatic needs of your body. For example, if you have excessive salt, blood pressure will go up in order to increase flow through your kidneys. These things are important, heart rate has to be modulated according to biological needs. Even walking can cause a significant change in heart rate, blood pressure, and blood flow.

So a true artificial heart me too be able to account for all these factors the same way your real heart does. Or similarly at least.

That being said, a fully functional artificial replacement heart would certainly improve the average human lifespan, but it would be unlikely to improve the maximum human lifespan. The cardiovascular death accounts for many deaths, and if you remove that as an option, there is still an upper limit on people’s current life span, which is usually somewhere around 90 or 100 before the body just gives out.

Because there’s a lot of other parts to consider, your kidneys have to stay functional, your liver has to be good, your stomach and digestive system have to not break down. Your brain has to keep functioning, which it does not like to do after a certain point. Eventually, they just start to degrade… People do in fact die from dementia.

So what up the average lifespan but I don’t think it would affect the maximum lifespan. Of course, if we could grow everybody their own custom set of individual organs (with your own DNA so we don’t have to worry about rejection), the body would become a lot more robust… But there are still limits on how long your brain will survive. And I think those limits are not much more than the current lifetime limit which is driven apart by a bodily health.

Maybe we could have the average too 110 or 120 or even 130 if the body was kept incredibly healthy and people were otherwise doing things to keep the brain in good shape… Maybe.

Hmmm does an artificial heart know when to increase/decrease flow? Like when BPM goes up/down?

Cause i figure, your blood must be constantly be monitored for oxygen levels, and the artificial heart reacts to that measurement.

Its no longer an instinct done by the brain.

A full replacement for a heart that “works indefinitely” is far beyond our lifetimes lol. The heart does a lot more than just pump blood, and the best we can do after many decades of research is a glorified metal tube that you have to be hooked up to 24/7. That’s it.

Printed organs are also not coming in our lifetimes. Again, we can barely grow scraps of tissue after decades of research, and a fully formed organ is optimistically 40+ to 50+ years away. Xenotransplantation MAY bridge the gap, but even that is decades away, at best.

It also won’t be enough to just replace the heart. You would need an artificial stomach, artifical pancreas, artificial liver, etc etc, and needless to say, those are not happening this century.

And even if we could, we’d also need to keep the aging process at bay, which our children won’t get to see, let alone us.

The problem is not how long the heart can beat it’s a biocompatible issue. There is nothing artificial that does not create an immune response from the body. Every implant you will ever receive has a permanent immune response. The problem with artificial hearts is it creates blood clots even when using material that are more “biocompatible”.