With the help of this balloon, heart experts at Memorial Regional Hospital are putting the deep freeze on cells that cause the heart's rhythm to go haywire.
We're talking minus 80 degrees celsius which is 112 below zero farenheit...to treat atrial fibrillation.
Zipora Zinger describes what this rhythm disorder feels like. "And it's not constant. It will go...the rhythm will be whatever it wants...slow, fast."
Zipora was among the first patients in South Florida to undergo cryo-ablation for a-fib as it's called. The balloon is inserted through a catheter in the groin up to the area of the heart that's malfunctioning.
"These angiograms actually show the left atrium and this is the portion of the heart where most atrial defibrillation originates," says Awais Humayan, m.d., electrophysiologist.
This video provided by Medtronic shows the balloon heading to the area where cells are misfiring. Once it's at the right spot a refrigerant in the balloon is used to create lesions on purpose. "These lesions are directed at the little nests of cells which tend to do their own thing when they fire erratically. These are the triggers that cause the upper chamber of the heart to go into an irregular rhythm," adds Humayan.
Cryoablation is quicker than using radio frequency to destroy the cells with a higher success rate, but there's a learning curve.
"Once the operator gains a certain amount of experience the success rate based on a lot of the studies indicate that it could be upwards of 90 percent."
Zipora first had traditional ablation in 2009 and it didn't work. "It was good for a day. The next day I had the rhythm."
On February 22nd, Dr. Humayan tried this new freezing technique. "Since the procedure I can do everything. I don't rest. I walk. I am a completely different person...completely different person. I came back to what i used to be," says Zinger.
In Europe this procedure has been used for years.
So far only a dozen patients have been treated with cryo-ablation at that Miami hospital, but doctors there are saying it's a game changer in treating a-fib.
