I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from what surgeons among themselves call “pumphead,” an all-too apt appellative that refers to the dimwitted state in which patients seem to linger after being hooked up to a heart-lung machine for open-heart or, in my case, valve surgery. Other symptoms include patchy recall, social difficulties and personality changes. Pumphead was long suspected from anecdotal and journal reports of patients tested soon after their operations. But only recently did a five-year study of bypass patients indicate that after an initial recovery of mental capabilities in the first few months, the condition often worsens later and persists for years. Could the familiar heart-lung machine—which annually provides life-giving oxygen to blood during 900,000 coronary-bypass operations around the world—be at fault?

Making of the Machine
FIFTY YEARS AGO John Heysham Gibbon, Jr., of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia performed the first successful human surgery using a heart-lung machine. He had begun developing the device in the 1930s, as a research fellow in surgery at Harvard Medical School. After years of animal trials, and with engineering advice and financing from IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson and others, Gibbon solved what was then the major impediment to heart surgery—giving doctors enough time to operate.

Before Gibbon’s pump came into use, induction of, or cooling, the patient’s body to slow metabolism and blood circulation gave surgeons a 15-minute window to complete their work. Any longer and the body and brain suffered from a lack of oxygen. Gibbon’s machine took blood that would normally go to the heart and lungs, oxygenated it and pumped it back to the arterial system through the aorta. Today the pump’s use has become commonplace. Surgeons perform so many coronary-artery-bypass graftings, or CABGs, that they commonly refer to them as “cabbages.” But for decades the long-term effects of those operations received little serious study.

That has changed in recent years. In 2001 a New England Journal of Medicine article by Mark F. Newman, chair of Duke University Medical Center’s department of anesthesiology, and his colleagues revealed that even after five years many coronary-bypass patients still struggled with severe mental impairments.

Previous studies had followed subjects for only up to six months. “Adjectives such as ‘subtle,’ ‘transient,’ and ‘subclinical’ have been used to describe the cognitive decline that occurs after CABG, but such descriptions minimize the importance of these changes to clinicians, patients, and their families,” the article concludes. Adds Newman: “The month after the study came out, we received 4,000 e-mails from bypass patients. A lot of people were happy just to know they weren’t crazy.”

In the study, Newman and his group administered five cognitive tests—shortstory recall, repetition of number series, visual retention, pairing digits with symbols, and connecting a series of numbers and letters—to 261 heart-bypass patients the week before hospitalization, during the week after the operation, after six weeks and again six months later. After surgery, 53 percent of the subjects were unable to match their earlier cognitive performance. Six weeks later, 36 percent continued to be affected, and that number dropped to 24 percent after six months.