A GROUNDBREAKING way of monitoring a patient’s pacemaker is being trialled in Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton, thanks to the research of a cardiology doctor at the hospital.

The project is being led by Dr Stewart Brown, one of the cardiology registrars, as part of his PhD in cardiology research, which is supervised by consultant Dr Guy Furniss.

Patients are generally fitted with a pacemaker to help support their heart rhythm if a cardiologist detects that their heart beats too slowly because of weakened muscles.

Dr Brown, who is almost at the end of his third year in Musgrove, has lived in the Westcountry for about a decade, having moved from northern England, where he completed his foundation doctor training.

The project began five years ago when the cardiology team in Musgrove began to give patients with pacemakers a small monitoring device for when they returned home from hospital.

Dr Brown said: “The more people depend on their pacemaker, the more detrimental it can be to their health, and it can cause heart failure, something that has been well known for quite some time.

“Most people with pacemakers tend to be in their 70s or 80s, and they might just put this down to ageing, but by using the data we are able to detect it early and bring people in for treatment to make them feel better.

“Our cardiology service at Musgrove is unique in that rather than bringing patients into hospital to check their pacemaker, we send them home with a little device that they put next to their bed.

“When they go to sleep, the device runs a number of checks around midnight, and all that data is fed to us, which helps us to predict whether a patient’s heart is failing in response to a pacemaker.

“In many ways this is essential screening, where signs of potential heart failure can be detected early so the patient can have treatment before there is a significant decline in their condition.

“Therefore, if this problem is detected early then we are preventing people from coming into hospital with heart failure, and we know that if somebody is dependent on their pacemaker all the time it can make them breathless, so we can work hard to improve their symptoms.

“Our aim over the next 18 months or so is that if we are able to develop a predictive tool that will give patients an alert if they are developing heart failure, then our cardiology team can give them a call to say we have noticed something not right in the pacemaker, and their heart may be struggling.

“We would invite them into hospital, possibly change their medication, and we can even amend their prescription to a more complex one.

“This will make pacing safer as there is a growing amount of evidence that says some patients do not respond well to pacemakers and we do not know how to predict that at the moment.”