By Genevieve Wanucha

To rescue an abnormally beating heart, a defibrillator must deliver a whopping 1,000 volts to reset the electric charge in every cell in the organ and allow the heart to resume its rhythm. Such sizeable jolts cause pain and destroy irreplaceable cardiac tissue. Yet they are “the only effective method of salvaging someone from sudden death,” according to Peng-Sheng Chen, director of the Krannert Institute of Cardiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.

Researchers have long sought a painless, less damaging alternative to the standard defibrillator. In the 1980s, implantable defibrillators that provided lower-energy electrical pulses from inside the body in response to fast or disorganized heart rhythms came onto the market. Such devices were far less painful than their external predecessors, but they required invasive surgery and frequent battery changes.

“Surgeons had to literally crack open the chest to put the electrodes on the surface of the heart,” says Chen. What’s more, around one-third of all users of today’s implantable devices still experience unnecessary, painful zaps, which predispose them to fatal heart disturbances.

Fortunately for those at risk of sudden cardiac death, however, new technologies are on the horizon. “We, as a field, had pretty much given up on improving the way we defibrillate the heart for about a decade,” says Ronald Berger, a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Now, suddenly in the last year or so, there’s been a growing recognition that perhaps we’ve just assumed we can’t do better.”

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Image: by Flickr user ernstl under Creative Commons