The following is a transcript of a report by medical editor Marilyn Brooks that first aired Oct. 3, 2007, on WTAE Channel 4 Action News at 5 p.m.

---

Doctors at Children's Hospital are saving the lives of babies and children whose hearts have failed, and they're doing it with an experimental device called the Berlin Heart.

When an adult's heart fails, there are any number of ventricular assist devices that can help it survive and recover. There was nothing like that for infants and toddlers until the Berlin Heart came along.

T.J. Wilson needed a Berlin Heart in July.

"He just went really stiff, then limp," said Wilson's mother, Lori. "She (the doctor) hurried up and put the stethoscope on and looked up at me and said, 'I don't have a heartbeat.'"

After two days of vomiting and lethargy, T.J. Wilson was brought to Children's Hospital's emergency room. Fifteen minutes later, his heart suffered diastolic failure. It squeezed OK, but couldn't fill. Doctors put him on a heart-lung bypass machine for one week.

"Then he went on a Berlin Heart, and was on a Berlin Heart six days, and then an organ became available and he was transplanted," Dr. Peter Wearden said.

The Berlin Heart is the only heart-assist device used for babies and children. It is in clinical trials. The Food and Drug Administration wants it to be used on at least 100 patients before it considers approval. So far, Children's Hospital has used it in five patients.

"It basically assists the heart," Wearden said. "The blood goes into a sack, and then that sack is forced by air to cause an ejection of that blood, so it sort of replaces what the ventricle of the heart would do."

It took blood from T.J. Wilson's atria and pumped it to his lungs and body, keeping him alive until he received his new heart on July 16.

"We needed that," Lori Wilson said. "We wouldn't have made it to transplant, I don't think."

The FDA granted compassionate use of the Berlin Heart for children in life-threatening heart failure. All five patients in Pittsburgh have received successful transplants.

Five other centers across the country are involved in the clinical trial of the Berlin Heart, which is scaled down to work in the smallest of patients.

---

More:
Visit ThePittsburghChannel.com's Children's Health Center For More Information

---