Not everyone can afford a pacemaker, so these doctors are recycling them – CBC

Preliminary results from nearly 300 patients find used pacemakers are just as safe and effective as new ones

Nov 27, 2024

It’s been more than a decade since a man walked into a Michigan hospital and made the unusual request to donate his late wife’s pacemaker.

She had the brand new device implanted just a few months before she died of unrelated causes, says Dr. Thomas Crawford, cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of Michigan.

“He said, ‘Well, my wife was very much into recycling, and I really hope that you can really use it for somebody else,” Crawdord told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal.

“We didn’t think we could use it because it’s not legal in the United States to reuse a pacemaker. But it did get us thinking about whether we could use this device anywhere else.”

Now Crawford and his colleagues are sharing early results of their randomized trial of nearly 300 patients across seven countries showing that used pacemakers, when properly sterilized and implanted, work just as well as new ones, and pose no greater risk of infection.

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/reused-pacemaker-trial-1.7394818