CardioFit Gets On Your Nerves To Save Your Heart

It looks like an MP3 player, but the CardioFit device isn’t meant for entertainment. This Israeli innovation from BioControl Medical, now being tested on 200 patients at 50 US medical centers, is an implantable electrical stimulation device designed to improve cardiac function in patients with congestive heart failure (HF).

With heart disease ranked as the world’s top killer, BioControl is looking at a potential market worth $4 billion. The device represents a new and unique source of hope for millions of HF patients.

CEO Ehud Cohen explains that CardioFit addresses an imbalance in the autonomic nervous system’s sympathetic and parasympathetic branches, which regulate heart muscle activity.

To envision the way this is supposed to work, he suggests thinking of the sympathetic branch as a car’s gas pedal, and the parasympathetic branch as its brake pedal.

“If the ‘gas pedal’ is making the car go too fast, drugs can treat this — like lifting the foot from the pedal just the right amount,” Cohen tells ISRAEL21c. “But the ‘brake pedal’ cannot be treated, and that is what we do.”

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Via ISRAEL21c
Photo by BioControl Medical