From Ontario, Canada's paper Globe & Mail, we found out about a novel use for pacemakers to treat a very rare condition that impedes breathing. Congenital hypoventilation or alveolar hypoventilation occurs when a person is born without the body's natural impulse to draw breath.
A person with this condition can simply stop breathing and may be unaware of his or her body's urgent demand for oxygen. People with this condition are sometimes tethered to ventilation machines to be sure that they keep breathing. While this can help with the immediate problem (impaired ability to breathe), people on these machines long term are at high risk for pneumonia and other respiratory infections. Furthermore, being hooked up on a machine all of the time definitely decreases quality of life.
Pacemakers have long been known to have a potential side effect: they can sometimes stimulate the phrenic nerve. The phrenic nerve is located near the heart and lungs. Pacemakers can also stimulate the diaphragm, a muscle below the lungs that helps the lungs expand and contract. If you have ever suffered from a bad case of the hiccups, you know how powerful the diaphragm can be. Hiccups occur when the diaphragm gets out of whack with the body's natural breathing cycles.
Late December 2009, doctors in Canada implanted a pacemaker in the diaphragm of a 50-year-old woman who had the rare breathing disorder (hypoventilation). It is the same kind of pacemaker that one would use to stimulate the heart, only in this case it stimulate the diaphragm. That, in turn, is thought to help stimulate breathing.
Similar procedures have been performed on people with spinal cord injuries who were having trouble breathing. Doctors speculate that there may be more and more uses for the "diaphragm pacemaker," including to treat patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).
