Not everyone can afford a pacemaker, so these doctors are recycling them 

It's been more than a decade since a man walked into a Michigan hospital and made the unusual request to donate his late wife's pacemaker.

She had the brand new device implanted just a few months before she died of unrelated causes, says Dr. Thomas Crawford, cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of Michigan.

"He said, 'Well, my wife was very much into recycling, and I really hope that you can really use it for somebody else," Crawdord told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal. 

"We didn't think we could use it because it's not legal in the United States to reuse a pacemaker. But it did get us thinking about whether we could use this device anywhere else."

Now Crawford and his colleagues are sharing early results of their randomized trial of nearly 300 patients across seven countries showing that used pacemakers, when properly sterilized and implanted, work just as well as new ones, and pose no greater risk of infection.

The findings — presented last week at an American Heart Association conference in Chicago — are preliminary, and have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. But doctors who work with pacemakers are cautiously optimistic about the potential impact of this research. 

"These researchers are to be commended," Dr. Calum Redpath, a cardiologist at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute who wasn't directly involved in the research, told CBC. "Hopefully, we are able in the future to be able to offer this service to low-and middle-income countries."

Pacemakers are small, surgically implanted, battery-powered devices that prevent the heart from beating too slowly. They save and extend lives and dramatically reduce suffering, Crawford says. 

In both Canada and the U.S., pacemakers are approved as single-use only devices, in line with manufacturers' instructions. 

But in less wealthy countries, not everyone who needs a pacemaker can afford one.

"Unfortunately, in many countries … the expense of a pacemaker has to be borne by the family or the patient, and it has to be rendered before the procedure is done," Crawford said. 

The University of Michigan's Frankel Cardiovascular Center estimates that every year, between one and two million people die worldwide due to a lack of access to pacemakers and defibrillators.

That's where the My Heart Your Heart project comes in. The University of Michigan program collects and sterilizes pacemakers from hospitals and funeral homes for use in low- and middle-income countries.

Currently, they are conducting a clinical trial of 298 patients in Sierra Leone, Venezuela, Nigeria, Kenya, Paraguay, Mexico and Mozambique.