Heart failure results when your heart doesn’t pump blood effectively, and fluid can build up throughout your body.

One of the most common symptoms of heart failure is swelling, especially in the legs, ankles, feet or abdomen. Fluid can also build up in the lungs, causing shortness of breath and making you feel like you are suffocating.

Thankfully, innovative technology at North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo offers dramatic results—a procedure called aquapheresis that removes extra fluid from the body.

Melvin’s Story

Melvin Langley, 81, of Tupelo had his first open heart surgery in 1995 and another in 2011. His heart rocked along well until a few years ago, when heart failure became a real problem. “It’s hard for me to breathe and to get up and move around,” he says.

Melvin takes a diuretic (medicine to help reduce fluid), but recently when his home health nurse noticed labored breathing as well as swelling in his arms and legs, she sent him to NMMC.

Melvin’s cardiologist first tried traditional treatment, a high dose of diuretic medication by IV. While it helped Melvin shed one liter of fluid over three days, it simply was not enough. Then, they started aquapheresis.

“Think of aquapheresis like dialysis for the heart,” says interventional cardiologist Dr. Barry Bertolet. “This process is designed for people with heart failure who are overloaded with fluid and diuretics aren’t working well. Perhaps diuretics have worked well for them in the past, but sometimes bodies become resistant to them and the medication becomes ineffective.”

Aquapheresis utilizes a machine that removes blood from the body, runs it through a special filtration system to remove water, and then returns the filtered blood to the body. “The doctor determines how much fluid is to be removed and at what pace so that it’s done safely in a manner that your kidneys and the rest of your body can tolerate,” Dr. Bertolet explains.

Aquapheresis can be performed in the hospital or as an outpatient procedure. Patients stop taking their diuretic while having aquapheresis, which gives their kidneys a break. “Oftentimes, this break improves their sensitivity to their medication,” Dr. Bertolet says, “so when they start taking it again, they may be able to take a smaller dose or take it less frequently.”

For Melvin, aquapheresis was a game-changer. He left the hospital 25 pounds lighter and feeling remarkably better. “There was no pain with the procedure—I just laid there and let it run,” he says. “It’s amazing how well it worked. It has tickled me to death.”

Proof Point

Studies demonstrate that patients with difficult to manage heart failure respond better to aquapheresis than traditional treatment.

Treatment time is determined by the amount of fluid that needs to be removed. “The normal length of stay for a heart failure patient receiving high doses of IV diuretic medication is eight to nine days, compared to four or five days with aquapheresis,” Dr. Bertolet says.

Fluid overload is a common cause of hospital readmission for heart failure patients—aquapheresis cuts the hospital readmission rate from 20-25% with traditional treatment to less than 10%.

“If we use aquapheresis for these sicker patients, we get them out of the hospital sooner, which reduces costs for the patient and the hospital,” he says. “Plus, they’re less likely to be admitted to the hospital and it improves their quality of life.”

Innovative technology reduces fluid overload in heart failure patients.