Nov 9, 2016 | By Benedict
After being diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, a disorder which affects the body's connective tissues, engineer Tal Golesworthy refused to undergo invasive and risky preemptive surgery. Instead, he recruited two doctors to 3D print a replica of his heart and make a special corrective device.
British engineer Tal Golesworthy
For over 30 years, British engineer Tal Golesworthy lived with Marfan syndrome, a life-threatening condition affecting his aorta. For most healthy people, the aorta stretches to accommodate blood flow before relaxing back to its previous size; for Golesworthy, doctors warned that his aorta would struggle to shrink back to size and would continue to enlarge over time—one day, they said, it might burst. In 2000, doctors told Golesworthy that the time had come to perform preemptive surgery.
Doctors told Golesworthy that the stretched section of his aorta would need replacing with an artificial graft, with metal valves possibly required. After the operation, Golesworthy would have to take blood-thinning drugs which could put him at a high risk of bleeding. Faced with this daunting proposition, Golesworthy simply declined, and went home to think about other solutions. The engineer, with no medical experience, decide...
SOURCE: 3ders.org ( go on reading...)
