FREE NEJM E-TOC    HOME   |   SUBSCRIBE   |   CURRENT ISSUE   |   PAST ISSUES   |   COLLECTIONS   |   Search Term  Advanced Search

Sign in | Get NEJM's E-Mail Table of Contents — Free | Subscribe

Previous Volume 357:2638-2639 December 20, 2007 Number 25 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	Full Text PDF PDA Full Text Purchase this article Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited E-mail When Letters Appear PubMed Citation

To the Editor: The longevity of pulse-generator batteries for cardiac pacemakers is still of some interest. On April 10, 1973, my colleagues and I implanted a plutonium-238 radioisotope pacemaker in a 20-year-old woman who had complete atrioventricular block after repair of a ventricular septal defect 6 years earlier. The nuclear pacemaker (Numec NU-5), one of the first of such devices implanted in the United States, was attached to a unipolar, "thumb tack" electrode of our own design. When the lead fractured 11 years later, it was repaired by splicing it to a new connector, retaining the same pacemaker. The stimulation . . . [Full Text of this Article]

HOME  |  SUBSCRIBE  |  SEARCH  |  CURRENT ISSUE  |  PAST ISSUES  |  COLLECTIONS  |  PRIVACY  |  HELP  |  beta.nejm.org Comments and questions? Please contact us. The New England Journal of Medicine is owned, published, and copyrighted © 2008 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.