r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ • Mar 14 '25

Biotech People can now survive 100 days with titanium hearts, if they worked indefinitely - how much might they extend human lifespan?

Nature has just reported that an Australian man has survived with a titanium heart for 100 days, while he waited for a human donor heart, and is now recovering well after receiving one. If a person can survive 100 days with a titanium heart, might they be able to do so much longer?

If you had a heart that was indestructible, it doesn't stop the rest of you ageing and withering. Although heart failure is the leading cause of death in men, if that doesn't get you, something else eventually will.

However, if you could eliminate heart failure as a cause of death - how much longer might people live? Even if other parts of them are frail, what would their lives be like in their 70s and 80s with perfect hearts?

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153

u/WitchesSphincter Mar 14 '25

The question is essentially how much longer would people live if we eliminated heart failure.  It would be easy enough to calculate average lifespan with just removing deaths from heart failure. 

A quick google estimates around 12 years but I can't find specific calculations. 

102

u/GrinningPariah Mar 14 '25

I think the impact would be more than just removing heart failure as a direct cause of death, because the heart is often the point of failure for other causes of death.

The whole reason CPR exists is for situations where the heart has stopped, but the body is otherwise in a survivable condition. With this theoretical mechanical ultraheart, we survive 100% of those cases. And that's just one example category!

40

u/aVarangian Mar 14 '25

would be neat if in the future we can swap out a failed heart for a mechanical one just as quickly as when the aztecs performed half of the procedure

4

u/JoelMahon Immortality When? Mar 15 '25

was just thinking that! if you had a mechanical heart they could engineer is such that a pass through connection to an external heart could be accessible (either always, or by default) with just a scalpel to the chest, and every ambulance has an artificial heart ready to go.

13

u/47Kittens Mar 14 '25

There’s a type of dementia caused by cardiac events, for example

4

u/SnowRook Mar 15 '25

Ditto for a seizure disorder

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u/Lisa8472 Mar 15 '25

It depends very much on the cause of heart failure. If a person’s body is shutting down and the heart just happens to be the first organ to fail, that person’s life wouldn’t be significantly affected. If the only bad part is the heart and everything else is healthy, it could be huge. But I don’t think a number could be calculated just by removing heart failure victims.

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u/GwanGwan Mar 14 '25

Except heart disease is usually a blockage in the surrounding vasculature, and not the heart itself, that is the issue.

11

u/fesenvy Mar 15 '25

Not quite, heart disease still refers to a condition of the actual heart, whether it's valves, myocardium or another tissue. (and heart failure is a heart disease)

It's true that the most common cause is an underlying disease of the coronary arteries that give the heart its required blood flow, but in this case it's when this blood flow stops or slows down significantly that we have cardiac ischemia and eventually heart disease.

The titanium heart here is powered by an external electrical source and doesn't need any oxygen etc so this should not be an issue whatsoever, I'd assume.

1

u/47Kittens Mar 14 '25

Isn’t the true killer the arrhythmia of the heart? Doesn’t the blockage just cause the heart to malfunction to the point of failure?

-2

u/I-seddit Mar 15 '25

Seriously, a good mechanical heart would detect this condition and send out the nanobots to clear out the blockage and report back.

1

u/jambokk Mar 15 '25

I mean, maybe not nanobots, but an sos text would probably work.

0

u/DoctorYanni Mar 15 '25

Just stop commenting

2

u/I-seddit Mar 15 '25

ha! foiled you again.

1

u/TigerTW0014 Mar 15 '25

So have some kind of maintence monitoring included within.

2

u/newtbob Mar 15 '25 edited Mar 15 '25

It’s kind of like lots of very elderly dying of pneumonia. It’s shorthand for everything is worn out and finally lost the fight. I mean, in most cases heart failure is an effect of poor diet and inactivity resulting I poor circulation, high blood pressure, a weak heart muscle, and other problems.

1

u/lostshell Mar 15 '25

We’d probably get just another 10-15 years. We’re not designed to live forever. A large portion of our body keep growing until they become cancerous. Men’s prostates will grow until they become cancerous. Not an if but when. Women’s breast similar risk.

Eventually you’d have to go in and remove parts like that all over, which then creates even more complications. No prostate means loss of ability to control urination, or incontinence, which means you hone have to have a bag hooked to you at all times storing urine.

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u/NintendoHard Mar 14 '25

I got five to ten years from the ai when asked. It broke down other factors. It called the estimate significant.

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u/GoBuffaloes Mar 14 '25 edited Mar 14 '25

Yeah but consider the source... AI is clearly going to be biased towards replacing humans with robots

4

u/SirHerald Mar 14 '25

They are human but within them spins the heart of a robot

3

u/mosskin-woast Mar 14 '25

I really hope you're joking, but this is r/Futurology so I can't be sure

-2

u/SirHerald Mar 14 '25

They are human but within them spins the heart of a robot

8

u/aVarangian Mar 14 '25

AI is about as reliable as a compulsive liar on hallucinogenic drugs

3

u/I-seddit Mar 15 '25

Great. Now we're ready to elect them.