WASHINGTON - Four-month-old Damaris Ochoa was near death, born with an enlarged heart that was quickly giving out.
Obtaining a transplant in time was a long shot. Then Dr. Edward Rhee attached a souped-up adult pacemaker to her tiny heart, and six months later Damaris is thriving.
The Missouri tot is among the youngest of a few dozen children to try an experiment in which doctors are adapting a new technology for adults' failing hearts to the special needs of their smallest patients.
It's too early to know how well the therapy, called cardiac resynchronization, will work. But so far, a handful of youngsters are doing so well they've been taken off the heart transplant waiting list, and the hope is that others improve enough to postpone that operation.
"At least in the short term, we can improve their symptoms and quality of life," predicts Rhee, the electrophysiology chief at St. Louis Children's Hospital.
Cardiac resynchronizers, which hit the market three years ago, can dramatically help many adults with heart failure. Their hearts are weakened by age, a survived heart attack or some other disease, and get flabbier as they struggle to pump blood through the body.
Pacemakers are best known for speeding up a sluggish heartbeat. The resynchronizers are souped-up pacemakers that work differently - because in heart failure, the struggling heart beats too fast. Instead, three wires that deliver electricity are threaded deep into various parts of the heart to make the pumping chambers, called ventricles, move together in rhythm, thus increasing their power.
Children's heart failure has different causes. Some are born with an enlarged heart or suffer a heart-damaging viral infection. Others are born with structurally abnormal hearts, and surgeries to correct those birth defects can hurt the heart's electrical system in ways that, years