ø Yum: Scientists working to make tastier tomatoes. SH2

Our ancestor: Tiny sea creature with a big mouth. SH3

Star Tribune visuals: Top 10 in the worldFrom the Society for News Design (2015, 2016)

SCIENCE & HEALTHS TA R T R I B U N E . C O M / S C I E N C E • S E C T I O N S H

By JEREMY OLSON jeremy.olson@startribune.com

A low vaccination rate among pregnant women to pre-vent whooping cough in their babies might be explainable, considering that the federal recommendation to receive the vaccine during each pregnancy is only four years old.

But a state survey of flu shots among pregnant women found the rate to be worse. And they have been recommended

for decades.Together, the results disap-

pointed public health advo-cates who want to use mater-nal vaccinations to prevent disabling and deadly diseases from spreading to newborns.

Reviewing records for 113,730 women who gave birth in 2013 and 2014, officials from the Min-nesota Department of Health found that 58 percent received the DTaP shot for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whoop-ing cough). Only 46 percent

received flu shots during their pregnancies, despite evidence that both vaccines pass from mothers to their fetuses and protect them at birth.

“This is really to protect those most vulnerable before they are old enough to receive their own vaccinations,” said Anna Fedorowicz, an immuni-zation coordinator for the state Health Department. She co-authored a report on the sur-vey results that was recently published by the U.S. Centers

for Disease Control and Pre-vention.

The results mirrored national data, but the state survey was unique in that it looked at racial, ethnic and socioeconomic differences in Minnesota. Vaccinations were less likely among American Indians and women born in Somalia or Eastern Europe.

Doctors have found many Somali women reluctant to vaccinate their children against measles, mumps and rubella

because of fears that the MMR shots have a link to autism.

“Is that isolated, or is it potentially cultivating the sense of fear or concern about … other vaccinations too?” Fedorowicz asked.

Vaccinations were less likely among women who were uninsured, received inadequate prenatal care and had less formal education.

A doctor’s recommenda-tion can make a big difference, officials say, so the Health

Department has privately ana-lyzed the data by individual cli-nicians and contacted doctors with the lowest rates.

“Having that data to point back to has been informative for providers,” said Miriam Muscoplat , a co-author of the report, “who generally think they’ve been doing really, really awesome at things when the data doesn’t necessarily show that.”

Jeremy Olson • 612-673-7744

Pregnant women often skip vaccines that can protect their babies

Stretch studios aim to ease the tension of daily life, intense workouts

improve athletic performance.”However worthy their cause, these stretching

emporiums have an uphill climb. The fitness indus-try has seen its share of fads — step classes, Cal-lanetics, dancercise, Zumba — and failures. Real estate prices are high, customer loyalty uncertain.

“Just like any small business, there are defi-nite challenges to operating a health club,” said Meredith Poppler, the vice president for com-munications at the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association, a trade group. “High competition, especially in urban areas, is often fierce, and member retention rates keep many club operators up all night.”

DuBose and her peers face a particular

THE NEXT BIG THING IN FITNESS?

Story by JOANNE KAUFMAN • Photos by TODD HEISLER • New York Times

Nazare Rodrigues is 41 in human years. But as she learned recently at Power Stretch Studios when she sat on the floor,

extended her legs and tried valiantly to touch her fingertips to her toes, she is a lot older — 56 — in stretch years. ¶ “I feel

very stiff, you know?” said Rodrigues, a legal assistant who signed up for a 45-minute session after seeing the company’s

sign in a second-floor window in Midtown Manhattan. ¶ “I feel problems bending down and picking things up.” ¶ The

company’s owner, Hakika DuBose — Kika for short — is a former actor and dancer who opened her business in May 2011

to address what she saw as a gap in the exercise market: facilities devoted exclusively to relaxing the bundled muscles of the tired and toned.

“There are all these peak fitness places that have popped up,” said DuBose, who is 32 (but 25 in stretch years), referring to SoulCycle, Barry’s Bootcamp and CrossFit. “People go five times a week and their muscles are very overworked and contracted.”

She is far from the only entrepreneur who is confident that stretching is the new big thing in fitness. Studios are popping up in cities from Bos-ton to Los Angeles.

“Stretching is especially important in our mod-ern world because we don’t have as many slow movements integrated into most of our lives any-more,” said Diane Waye, the owner of Stretching by the Bay, a studio in San Francisco. “We need to keep our range of motion open to help pre-vent joint disease, pain and posture issues and to

‘ R E L A X I N G ’ : Hakika DuBose has opened five Power Stretch Studios. At top, she stretched Mat-

thew Frankel at the Manhattan location. See STRETCH on SH3 Ø

ZSW [C M Y K] SH1 Sunday, Feb. 12, 2017

S U N DAY, F E B R U A RY 1 2 , 2 0 1 7

Health HighlightsF R OM MAY O C L I N I C

Today on the back page

A Device That Offers Hopeto Heart Failure Patients.

A Device That Offers Hopeto Heart Failure Patients.

Today on the back page.

Health HighlightsF R OM MAY O C L I N I C

ON YOUR HEALTH

Guidance for treatment of prostate cancerMen whose prostate cancer comes back after surgery are more likely to survive if, along with the usual radiation, they also take drugs to block male hormones. The finding, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, will help clarify treatment for many patients, experts say. After surgery to remove the prostate, more than 30 percent of men have a recurrence, and until now there has not been clear evidence about the best way to stop the disease from killing them. The study showed that among men who received radiation and hormonal treatment, 76.3 percent were still alive after 12 years, compared to 71.3 percent who had radiation alone.

A swig of hydrogen peroxide can kill youHundreds of people have become severely ill and at least five have died after consuming high-concentration hydrogen peroxide that some people take as an additive to their diets, according to a new study. The colorless, caustic liquid quickly releases a bubble of oxygen that can find its way into a blood vessel, blocking blood flow to the heart, the brain, the lungs or other parts of the body, according to the research, in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Alternative health sites promote consumption of a few drops of high-concentration hydrogen peroxide heavily diluted in water or another liquid as a treatment for a wide variety of ailments.

Preterm birth may warn of heart disease riskA preterm birth appears to be an early warning signal of a wom-an’s risk for heart disease, a new study shows. The study, pub-lished online in the journal Circulation, found that compared with women who delivered full-term babies, women who gave birth earlier than 37 weeks had a 42 percent increased risk of stroke or heart attack later in life. Among women who gave birth at 32 weeks or sooner, the risk was more than doubled. The higher risk of heart disease was independent of the mother’s pre-pregnancy lifestyle and other heart risk factors.

NEWS SERVICES

By SETH BORENSTEIN • Associated Press

Bite into a supermarket tomato and you’ll probably notice something missing: taste. Scientists think they can put the yum back into the grocery tomato by tinkering with its genetic recipe.

Researchers are reinstalling five long-lost genetic traits that add much of the sweet-yet-acidic taste that had been bred out of mass-produced tomatoes for the past 50 years. They’re

using mostly natural breeding methods, not genetic modification technology.“We know what’s wrong with modern tomatoes and we have a pretty

good idea how to fix it,” said University of Florida horticultural scientist Harry Klee, co-author of a study in the journal Science.

Yield of tomatoes has tripled since 1960, but there’s been a slow decline in taste quality as tomatoes have been bred for size and sturdiness at the expense of flavor. Klee said a tastier supermarket tomato could be ready within three years.

“Nobody deliberately set out to make tomatoes that don’t have flavor,” Klee said. “Basically it was a process of neglect.”

One key issue is size. Growers keep increasing individual tomato size and growing more per plant. The trouble is that there is a limit to how much sugar each tomato plant can produce. Bigger tomatoes and more of them means less sugar per tomato and less taste, Klee said.

So Klee and colleagues looked at the genomes of the mass-produced tomato varieties and heirloom tomatoes to try to help the grocery tomatoes catch up to their backyard garden taste.

Good tiny heirloom tomatoes “are like eating candy,” said New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle, who wasn’t part of the study. “For people who care about how food tastes, it’s a very big deal.”

Klee isolated some sugar genes and ones that were more geared to pure taste, but figured those won’t work as well because they clash against grow-ers’ shipping and size needs. So he found areas that affect the aroma of toma-toes but not size or heartiness. Reintroducing those into mass-produced tomatoes should work because smell is a big factor in taste, he said.

Altering genes in a lab would make the process faster, but because of consumer distrust and regulations, Klee is opting for natural breeding methods — with help from an electric toothbrush to spread pollen. He’s not quite there yet, but is close.

Jose Ordovas, a nutrition professor at Tufts University, applauded the work, but cautioned: “It is possible that some traits are not compatible and you cannot make the plant to behave exactly the way that you want.”

Reggie Brown of growers’ Florida Tomato Committee praised the study, saying it could help make supermarket tomatoes taste better.

No matter how much tinkering scientists do to mass-produced tomatoes, picking them too early and refrigerating them can make them bland. And consumers do have to be willing to pay more to have fresher, unrefrigerated tomatoes, said Klee, who generally doesn’t do the taste testing in his lab.

“I don’t like raw tomatoes very much at all. You know, I’m kind of tired of them,” he said.

PUTTING THE FLAVOR BACK IN TOMATOES

Over time, much of the taste has been bred

out of tomatoes, but scientists have a fix

By BEN GUARINO Washington Post

Of all the strange and mar-velous appendages to arise in animal anatomy, the frog tongue is one of the few to meet the requirements of a Mar-vel Comics superpower: the “X-Men” villain Toad boasted a 30-foot prehensile tongue with which he would do battle.

Real amphibian organs are no less deadly — if you are a cricket, anyway — and have long been objects of fascina-tion. Yet how, exactly, frogs maintain their grip on insects during their speedy attacks is not fully understood. Sci-entists know the tongues are super-adhesive; one 2014 study revealed that a frog tongue could heft objects 1.4 times the animal’s own body weight, relying on a mecha-nism that the Los Angeles Times likened to the glue on the back of a Post-it note.

But it would not be until Alexis C. Noel, a biomechanics doctoral student at the Geor-gia Institute of Technology, watched a video of an African bullfrog crushing digital bugs with its tongue (the pet frog was playing the mobile game “Ant Smasher,” the stuff multi-million-view YouTube clips are made of) that she began to wonder if researchers had missed a trick.

That trick turned out to be frog spit, Noel found. Frog spit can change physical proper-ties, transforming from a glue more viscous than honey to a thinner fluid and back again. The interplay between this reversible frog saliva and extra-soft frog tongues, as Noel and her colleagues revealed in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, allows the animals to capture meals in the amount of time it takes a human brain to think of and speak a word.

The saliva currently swish-ing around your teeth and gums, as helpful and lubri-cative as it is, will not trans-form like frog spit. Where we have salivary glands, the frog tongue itself produces spit. Even when you cut the tongue out of a frog, as Noel did more than a dozen times as part of the new study, the organ will still ooze saliva.

Frog tongues are also much softer than human tongues. “It feels like when you chew a piece of gum for too long,” said Noel . “Soupy and disgusting.”

Having determined the bio-mechanical properties of the frog tongues, Noel and her colleagues then watched frogs catch food with high speed cameras. Noel broke down the attack into three steps. First, when the tongue slapped into a bug, the organ deformed and wrapped around the prey, maximizing contact area. With the force of the impact the viscous spit turned to liq-uid, seeping into the tiny little cracks of the insect’s shell.

Second, the tongue retracted into the mouth as the spit returned to its thick state, securing the bug in place. If a soft frog tongue was an elas-tic bungee cord, Noel likened the stiffer human tongue to a rope. This elasticity allows the frog to keep its prey and dampen the extreme forces of the strike. “Jump off a bridge with a rope tied around your ankle,” Noel said, “and your ankle is going to come off.”

Finally, once it had a bug in its mouth, the frog needed to dislodge its prey from the spit. To do so, the frog pressed down with its eyes. Like a fish-ing bobber that dipped below the surface of a pond, the frog’s eyeballs momentarily disap-peared into its mouth. This sheared the bug free from the sticky tongue and down into the frog’s gullet.

The power of the frog’s tongue may be in spit

CANDLER HOBBS • Georgia TechScientists found that frogs’ transformative saliva and extra-soft tongues allow for their speedy attacks on insects.

iStock photo

A couple of days outdoors can reset circadian clock.

By DEBORAH NETBURN Los Angeles Times

Are you sick of going to bed late and waking up tired? Then grab your hiking boots and a tent. A new study suggests that a couple of days of camping in the great outdoors can reset your circadian clock and help you get more sleep.

The circadian clock is an internal clock that tells your body when it’s time to go to sleep and when it’s time to wake up. Scientists track this clock by measuring the amount of melatonin circulat-ing in a person’s blood at any given time.

In a healthy sleeper, mela-tonin levels rise a few hours before bedtime, stay high through the night, and then settle back down to daytime levels when it’s time to wake up. The span of time when melatonin levels are elevated is known as biological night.

In our modern society, bio-logical night does not usually coincide with night in the nat-ural world. Most of us stay up many hours past sunset and would probably sleep in many hours after sunrise if we could.

The trouble is, if your biolog-ical night begins at midnight or later, your melatonin levels may still be high when your alarm clock goes off in the morning. This leads to grogginess, but it may have other health con-sequences as well . Diabetes, obesity and heart disease have all been associated with people not getting enough sleep.

Previous research by inte-grative physiology professor Kenneth Wright of the Uni-versity of Colorado at Boul-der found that people can reset their circadian clocks by tak-ing a six-day summer camping trip in the Rocky Mountains.

That 2013 study showed that by the end of the trip, the camper’s bodies started to release melatonin around sunset, and stopped releasing it around sunrise — an average of two hours earlier than when they were tested at home.

Additionally, during the

camping trip, the study partici-pants didn’t get up for an entire hour after their bodies stopped releasing melatonin, making it easier for them to wake up in the morning.

“That original study answered a lot of questions, but it raised more questions,” Wright said.

In the new work, published in Current Biology, Wright’s team set out to determine if our circadian clocks can be reset by a shorter jaunt in nature, and if these biological clocks respond to seasonal influences.

To answer the first ques-tion, the researchers recruited 14 physically active volunteers in their 20s and 30s. Nine went on a weekend camping trip, while the other five stayed home. At the end of the week-end, the authors monitored the volunteers’ melatonin levels to see if there had been any shift in the timing of their biologi-cal night.

The researchers report that in just two days, the campers’ circadian clocks shifted so that their melatonin levels began to rise more than an hour earlier then they did in the days before they left on the trip. Overall, the difference was equiva-lent to 69 percent of the effect that the researchers observed when campers went on a six-day trip in 2013.

“This tells us we can reset our clocks fast,” Wright said.

The authors also found that the circadian clocks of the group that stayed home shifted even later over the course of the weekend.

“Those people stayed up later and slept in more, like lots of us do on the weekend, and that pushed their clocks later too,” he said.

In another experiment, the authors sent five brave volun-teers on a six-day winter camp-ing trip to determine whether the circadian clock is affected by seasonal changes in day length. When the campers returned home, the authors found that the winter camping group’s biological night was longer than that of the group that went camping for a week in the summer back in 2013.

For better sleep, try camping trip

iStock photoA new study suggests that a couple of days of camping can reset your circadian clock and help you get more sleep.

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By SETH BORENSTEIN • Associated Press

H oly drone, Batman! Mechanical masterminds have spawned the Bat Bot, a soaring, sweeping and diving robot that may eventually fly circles

around other drones.Because it mimics the unique and more flexible way

bats fly, this 3-ounce prototype could do a better and safer job getting into disaster sites and scoping out construc-tion zones than bulky drones with spinning rotors, said the three authors of a study in the journal Science Robot-ics. For example, it would have been ideal for going inside the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, said study co-author Seth Hutchinson, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois.

The bat robot flaps its wings for better aerial maneu-vers, glides to save energy and dive bombs when needed. Eventually, the researchers hope to have it perch upside down , but that will have to wait for the robot’s sequel.

Like the fictional crime fighter Batman, the research-ers turned to the flying mammal for inspiration.

“Whenever I see bats make sharp turns and perform

upside down, perching with such elegant wing move-ments and deformations, I get mesmerized,” said another author, Soon-Jo Chung, a professor at Caltech.

The Bat Bot has nine joints and measures slightly less than 8 inches from head to tail. Its super-thin membrane wings span about a foot and a half. The flexible flapping — as much as 10 times per second — acts “like a big power amplifier,” Hutchinson said.

The researchers still need to add cameras, build more drones and get permission from federal agencies to fly them, but Hutchinson said these bat robots could be flying around work sites and disaster zones within five years. It’s already taken three years and cost $1.5 million, including a team of experts from Brown University who studied bat flight, Hutchinson said.

Outside robotics experts were impressed, but cautious.Smaller fixed-wing drones have problems with

maneuverability and four rotors are not efficient, so a bat-inspired design is “a very intriguing line of research,” University of Pennsylvania engineering professor Vijay Kumar said in an e-mail. However, he noted, “it is too early to tell if these designs will actually be superior.”

SWOOPING DRONE MIMICS BAT FLIGHT

ALIREZA RAMEZANI • University of Illinois via Associated PressB AT B O T: This 3-ounce flying robot mimics the flexible way bats fly, and researchers say this could help it do a better job of getting into disaster sites and scoping out construction zones.

D I S C O V E R Y: Saccorhytus, a microscopic sea creature that lived about 540 million years ago, is the oldest known ancestor of humans.

THE CUTTING EDGE

Black hole takes its time devouring starScientists have detected a black hole that’s taken a record-breaking decade to devour a star — and it’s still chewing away. The food fest is hap-pening in a small galaxy 1.8 billion light-years from Earth. University of New Hampshire research scientist Dacheng Lin said that black hole feeding frenzies have been observed since the 1990s, but they’ve lasted just a year. At 11 years and counting, this is the lon-gest known one yet.

Shark considered for threatened species listThe oceanic whitetip shark’s declining status in the wild warrants listing as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, the National Marine Fish-eries Service has determined. The shark is found around the world, mostly in open water . The listing would be the most widespread shark listing in the U.S. to date. Threats to the sharks include fishing pres-sure all over the world, as their fins are prized in Asian markets for use in soup. The sharks have declined by 80 to 90 percent in the Pacific Ocean since the 1990s, and 50 percent to 85 percent in the Atlantic Ocean since the 1950s. The fisheries service is expected to make a final deci-sion in November.

These deep-sea fish are built to eat bigIt’s cold and dark in the deep ocean. You eat what you can get. Here, big mouths help predators eat big prey. That may be why barbeled dragon-fish have special head joints that allow them to open up their mouths 120 degrees and swallow big prey whole. This flexible joint, described for the first time in a new study, allows the fish to move its head up and out, permitting it to engulf large prey that can sustain it for long peri-ods without additional food. Like the moray eel, barbeled dragonfish use a second set of teeth to pull the victim into their bodies for digestion.

NEWS SERVICES

Story by AMINA KHAN • Los Angeles Times • Rendering by JIAN HAN • Tribune News Services

A tiny wrinkled sack with a big mouth and no anus may well be the earliest-known of humans’ forebears. Meet Saccorhytus coronarius, a 540-million-year-old crit-ter the size of a grain of sand, whose fossil remains were discovered in China.

Scientists say Saccorhytus is the most primitive of the known deuterostomes, a group of organisms whose living descen-dants include a vast array of animals from humans to starfish. The find, described in the journal Nature, sheds new light on the rise of vertebrates .

When scientists want to study the ancient evolution of humans, they have to study the emergence of vertebrates — a diverse group that includes all animals with backbones, from fish and birds to reptiles and mammals .

So researchers look to study the oldest deuterostomes — a giant branch on the tree

of life whose descendants include verte-brates as well as echinoderms (such as star-fish and sea urchins) and a few other groups.

Scientists have discovered ancient deu-terostomes from around 510 million to 520 million years ago, but those fossils are too recent. These specimens typically show signs of already diversifying into verte-brates, tunicates, echinoderms and other lineages. To find something that looked more like a common ancestor, they’d have to find much older remains.

The new Saccorhytus fossils, at long last, help to fill in that gap. Measuring just 1.3 millimeters long, 0.8 of a millimeter wide and 0.9 of a millimeter high, Saccorhytus probably lived between grains of sand on the bed of shallow seas.

This deuterostome had a giant mouth that stretched about 0.3 to 0.5 of a millimeter

wide; scientists think it probably ate large food particles or even other tiny animals. Because it was covered with a thin, some-what flexible skin, scientists think it had some kind of musculature and got around by wriggling its round little body.

Saccorhytus doesn’t seem to have an anus — which means that any waste prod-ucts might have come back out through the mouth. (Gross as this may sound, it’s not uncommon: Jellyfish, for example, only have one opening.)

But there are also eight cone-line open-ings, four on either side of its body, which may have allowed all the water that it “swal-lowed” while eating with its giant mouth to pass through. These cone openings may have been the precursor of gills, the breath-ing apparatus eventually used by fish and other marine and aquatic animals.

TINY SEA CREATURE IS HUMAN ANCESTORThe critter sheds new light on the rise of vertebrates

challenge: Their programs are meant simply to supplement a workout. Also, stretching may hurt so good, but it still hurts (a lot, sometimes).

“You have to let your body get used to it,” Rick Charron, the manager of Boston’s Stre-tchOut Studios, said. “This is something that may start off painful, but you give it a couple of times and the pain will decrease as your range of motion increases.”

Power Stretch Studios’ aim is not just to increase flexibility but to reduce tension. “That’s the thing that makes me dif-ferent,” said DuBose, who requires employees and cus-tomers to sign nondisclosure agreements about the moves involved in what she calls the Kika Method.

To relax those taut muscles,

so-called stretch coaches work one on one with clients in cus-tomized sessions that are part massage, part chiropractic, part dancer’s warm-up. “It’s all about creating space within the body,” DuBose said.

Her target audience: the sedentary souls perennially slouched over their comput-ers, and fitness enthusiasts who view pre- and post-workout stretching as time better spent in transit or in the shower.

“Whether you work out or don’t work out, your muscles contract throughout the day,” DuBose said. “That keeps happening over time and puts pressure on your nerves and bones. People have nagging pain and they can’t figure out how to get rid of it, so they just live with it.

“It’s even worse for people

who do work out,” she con-tinued, “because when they stretch all that effort simply creates more contracting and more tension. People who are in pain have tried everything and they’re still in pain. Then they come to us and we’re like, ‘That isn’t pain; that’s tension.’ ”

Customers can expect to expend 125 calories for a 45-minute session, which costs

$80 to $100. An hourlong ses-sion is $90 to $120 .

Group classes were tried, then abandoned “because they don’t work,” DuBose said. She feels similarly about stretching machines, she said, “because they don’t know how far to stretch your body or when to stop.”

Low overhead may be helping stretch franchises expand. A mat, an exercise

ball and cervical and lumbar pillows are all the equipment required at Power Stretch; other companies deploy massage tables and Mattes chairs (which are designed for stretching). But perhaps more to the point, the timing may be just right.

“For the last five to seven years, the trend has been high-intensity like CrossFit,” Pete McCall, a spokesman for the American Council on Exer-cise, said. “But now we’re seeing a shift in the opposite direction, where the think-ing is, ‘Let’s work on passive mobility and range-of-motion and the recovery aspect of exercise.’ We’re starting to see more studios focus on passive stretching, or high-light it. They’re doing one-on-one sessions and group classes where the instructor coaches you how to position various limbs.”

On a recent Thursday eve-ning at the Power Stretch Stu-dio in Manhattan, DuBose headed to one of the three dark, small stretching rooms

to work on Matthew Frankel.“My wife got me a five-pack

of sessions for my birthday, and I’ve been addicted ever since,” said Frankel, 45, a com-munications strategist who is usually stretched twice a week at another studio in Montclair, N.J. When he came in for his initial assessment, he was somewhere between 56 and 65 in stretch years, he said; now he is a brag-worthy 25.

Stretch 12 in the Kika man-ual had DuBose cupping her hand over a tight muscle on Frankel’s shoulder blade. “I’m compressing it and helping it stretch and release,” she said. “The goal is to open the chest.”

Then she positioned him for a hamstring stretch. “Now, this is a stretch where I lose friends,” DuBose said. “Sorry,” she said, exerting pressure on his thigh. “Do you still like me?”

He does. “This is a very relaxing way to spend 60 min-utes,” Frankel said. “I could go to a national gym, but this is a small business providing craftsmanship.”

Stretching may be next big fitness fadø STRETCH from SH1

Hakika DuBose, a former actor and dancer, started her business in 2011 . She’s 32, but 25 in stretch years.

ZSW [C M Y K] SH3 Sunday, Feb. 12, 2017

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Those who qualify for

heart transplant may

have a long wait ahead.

There are approximately 4,000

people on the waiting list for a

donor heart.

The average wait time is 169 days.

Many patients with heart

failure don’t qualify for

a heart transplant due

to age, health, medical

condition or lifestyle.

Nearly ½ will die within 5 years

without a transplant or other treatment.

Ventricular Assist Device (VAD)

An implantable mechanical pump helps a

weakened or failing heart pump blood to the body.

Sources: MayoClinic.org; CDC.gov; optn.transplant.hrsa.gov.

Individualized Care for Patients with Heart FailureVAD can be a lifesaving option for patients with heart failure, and those who undergo heart transplant

can rest assured that our outcomes are unmatched. In fact, according the the Scientific Registry

of Transplant Recipients, Mayo Clinic in Rochester has the best three year patient survival for heart

transplant in the country. The experience, expertise and unique multidisciplinary approach at Mayo Clinic

ensures that all options are considered to deliver the most individualized care for every patient.

To learn more and request an appointment, visit MayoClinic.org/VAD.

Heart failure is a condition in which the heart doesn’t pump blood

as well as it should. Previously, treatment options were limited.

Now, implantable ventricular assist devices (VAD) give hope to an

estimated 5 million people living with heart failure.

Hope for Individuals with Heart Failure

VAD is a lifelong

therapy.

For patients who do not receive a

transplant, a ventricular assist device

can permanently supplement heart

function for a patient’s lifetime.

Lifespan and quality of life are

improved, with most patients

returning to the activities they love.

VAD is also a bridge to

heart transplant.

Implanted temporarily, a ventricular

assist device keeps blood pumping

while awaiting a heart transplant. It

may even improve the function of

other organs.

Temporary heart failure may also

call for VAD, allowing time for the

heart to strengthen.

Health HighlightsS P O N S O R E D C O N T E N T F R O M M AY O C L I N I C

HEART TRANSPLANT

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6

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