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Before this operation, I'd tried everything - from multiple drug treatments to a pacemaker - but my heart was getting worse. Since the surgery five months ago, my life has been transformed.
Experimental procedure: Tony Watson had a stimulator inserted. This stimulates the vagal nerve in the neck in time with the heartbeat
My problems began 20 years ago when I had a heart attack, despite being fit and healthy. A few months later, I was given a double bypass operation to divert blood around two blocked arteries.
That worked well until three years ago, when I started getting nagging angina pain in my chest.
After another heart attack in 2011, things worsened. That attack damaged my heart: one of the upper chambers was beating erratically, so wasn't pumping oxygenated blood round my body properly. I was told I had heart failure.
My health deteriorated rapidly - within a week, I could hardly get up the stairs. One day I was struggling to breathe and was taken to hospital in an ambulance. My lungs were filling with fluid, due to a build-up of pressure in blood vessels.
I was referred privately to the Royal Brompton Hospital. The cardiologist recommended a pacemaker to steady the erratic heartbeat and, if my heart stopped, shock it back into action.
It did help, but the smallest effort still left me breathless. I was taking beta-blockers to slow the heart rate and ACE inhibitors to lower blood pressure, but they weren't working.
Knowing heart failure only gets worse and there's no cure for it, earlier this year I asked Professor Martin Cowie, at the Royal Brompton, if there was something experimental I could try. He suggested I took part in the Inovate-HF (Increase of Vagal Tone in Heart Failure) trial.
A stimulator would transmit electrical signals to nerves in my neck in time with my beating heart to help it function better.
This is different from a pacemaker, which sends electrical impulses straight to your heart only when it detects it is too slow or out of rhythm.
I wanted to improve my lot: as well as running my own business, I have a wonderful family to consider - my wife Trisha, two grown-up children and my ten-year-old granddaughter Isabelle.
Luckily, I was one of the trial patients picked at random to have a working stimulator.
I had the procedure under a general anaesthetic. Leaving the pacemaker in place, they inserted the stimulator above the chest muscle on my right-hand side, connecting it to the vagal nerve in my neck as well as to my heart muscle using fine wires (this was so it could detect my heartbeat). I woke with a bandage on my neck and chest, but wasn't in pain, though you could see the wire through my skin. I was discharged the next day.
Five weeks later, with the wounds healed, they turned the stimulator on to its lowest setting. I felt a small tingling in my neck every few minutes.
After the third adjustment I noticed an amazing difference. My breathing has been improving ever since.
I still have to take drugs, but the results are astounding. At my last check-up, they found one of my heart valves, which had not been closing completely and was leaking blood in the wrong direction, is healing by itself.
It's as if my heart has been given rest and recuperation, and I've got a new lease of life.
THE SURGEON
Martin Cowie is professor of cardiology at Imperial College London.
Heart failure is when the heart can no longer pump sufficient blood around the body. The causes include a previous heart attack, damaged valves or an infection.
The heart tries to make up for this weakness by pumping more quickly, but this is a short-term fix - the heart muscle gets bigger, but weaker, and it puts pressure on the heart, leading to fluid build-up in the lungs.
Astounding results: The device, which assists the nerve that controls the heartbeat, has improved Tony's quality of life tremendously
Acute heart failure is a major cause of emergency admissions to hospital - 30 per cent of patients die within the year.
Beta-blockers and ACE inhibitors slow the heartbeat and help the heart pump better, but this treatment gives many people headaches and they don't stick to their regimens.
This new, minimally invasive procedure avoids these problems. When Tony first saw me, he was deteriorating. We can manage breathlessness, extreme tiredness and ankle swelling, but there's an inevitable decline.
The trial involves inserting a stimulator, similar to a pacemaker, which stimulates the vagal nerve in the neck in time with the heartbeat.
This nerve extends from the brain to the abdomen, and carries signals to and from the brain, controlling instinctive responses, including heartbeat.
There is another vagal stimulator for heart failure being trialled elsewhere, known as the NECTAR trial, but this does not connect with the heart. Animal studies show a stimulator working in time with the heartbeat is likely to be more effective.
The device rebalances the heart's function. Normally, the brain helps to control this through the sympathetic branch of the nervous system (which activates the 'fight or flight' response in a crisis, increasing blood pressure and heart rate) and the parasympathetic branch (which calms the heart through signals carried from the brain to the heart via the vagal nerve).
With heart failure, these branches are out of balance - the sympathetic branch overworks, while the parasympathetic is underactive.
The stimulator seems to activate the parasympathetic branch in a way no drugs have been shown to do. It's like stepping on the brake of a runaway heart, taking the strain off, so it pumps better.
The device stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system via the vagal nerve, while a pacemaker sends electrical impulses to the heart, stimulating it to contract when it detects it is too slow or out of rhythm.
During the procedure, we make an incision in the skin above the breast bone and insert a square stimulator, the size of an After Eight, under the fat.
Then we make a small incision in the neck just above the carotid artery, which carries oxygenated blood to the brain. The vagal nerve runs alongside the artery and is slightly larger than cooked spaghetti.
We encircle it with an electrode, then run a flexible wire from the simulator under the skin over the collarbone and up the neck before attaching it to the electrode.
Then we puncture a hole in the vein under the collarbone and feed another wire from the stimulator down through blood vessels and into the right upper chamber of the heart until it touches the heart muscle wall.
This wire senses the heartbeat and transmits this information back to the stimulator, which then transmits electrical signals to the vagal nerve in time.
Though the stimulator can't cure heart failure, it can aid the heart to heal itself by helping it work properly and without strain. Studies show it even helps reduce the heart back to normal size.
Tony's mouth felt dry for a few weeks - the vagal nerve controls sensations in the mouth - but he soon stopped noticing it. He will wear the stimulator for life.
The operation carries a slight risk of infection and of injuring the nerve or heart when the device is implanted, but the procedure is quick, inexpensive and improves quality of life.
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