Washington, DC - The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the US is set to air a two-part series entitled The Mysterious Human Heart, a series that deals with heart failure, arrhythmias, and the silent nature of cardiovascular disease. Aimed at a general public audience, the series wastes no time getting to the "heart of the matter," with local experts weighing in on the heart muscle itself and the various diseases associated with it.

"The heart is a pump, but it has to be the most reliable pump there is because your life depends on it," says Dr Marc Pfeffer (Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA). "The heart pumps blood through the lungs, through the body, from infancy to adulthood, against all the barriers we place against it, against high blood pressure, leaky valves."

The series is divided into three parts: "Endlessly Beating," the "Spark of Life," and the "Silent Killer." In each part, the documentary relies on experts, including Pfeffer, Dr Denton Cooley (Texas Heart Institute, Dallas TX), Dr Daniel Rader (University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Philadelphia), Dr Karol Watson (University of California, Los Angeles), Dr Arthur Moss (University of Rochester Medical Center, NY), and Dr Valentin Fuster (Mount Sinai Medical Center, NY), among others, to discuss the complex heart issues in a language that can be plainly understood by an intelligent general audience.

The Mysterious Human Heart appears on television October 15 and 22 at 9:00 PM Eastern Time on PBS.

The first story opens with Beth Bradley, a heart-failure patient with a ventricular-assist device in need of transplantation. Despite the advances of the devices, Cooley says that there is no device as good as the human heart, "even if it belongs to someone else."

"We've reached an area where we're testing these ventricular-assist devices, but transplantation is still the most effective means of replacing the heart,'" says Cooley.

Bradley received a biventricular-assist device, although doctors acknowledge that it's not a long-term solution. While she needs transfusions to replace damaged blood cells, doctors acknowledge that this decreases her likelihood of accepting a new heart, mainly because the antibodies needed for blood transfusions make it difficult to accept a foreign heart.

However, instead of the device being used as a bridge to transplant, Bradley's doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital are optimistic that if the biventricular-assist device is turned off, the heart might be sufficiently recovered. However, the VAD as a bridge to recovery fails in Bradley's case, and she is forced to wait, like many thousands of Americans, on the heart-transplant list.

Perhaps the most interesting segment in the Mysterious Human Heart is dedicated to the largely unknown: silent coronary artery disease. Patients with no chest pain, no shortness of breath, especially women, undergo noninvasive tests to determine what is exactly wrong with their health.

"One of the scariest things about coronary disease is that it remains silent for so long," says Rader.

The documentary then delves into pre-Framingham Heart Study (FHS) thinking, where MI was thought to be an inevitable consequence of aging, as noted by Dr William Kannel (Framingham Heart Study, Boston, MA). The series goes into great detail highlighting the goals and aims of the FHS, suggesting that the study began with a blank state, but by 1961, when the first paper, regarded as one of the single most important public-health publications in the 20th century, was published, the results initiated a revolution.

"The Framingham Heart Study put preventive cardiology on the map because prior to that time it didn't really exist," says Kannel.

The "Spark of Life" concerns itself with the "rhythm of life," a rhythm that is mainly determined by the heart's electrical system. The series introduces viewers to the Oill family, whose eldest child suffered sudden cardiac arrest but survived, most likely because his roommates were trained emergency medical technicians. Like others in his family, Kevin Oill had long-QT syndrome, a genetic disorder that placed his brothers at risk when it was discovered that they too had the gene for the deadly arrhythmia.

"The heart is a biologic organ," explains Dr Douglas Zipes (Indiana University Medical School, Indianpolis). "It is not a Swiss watch. It can have little hiccups where the heart rhythm is not 60 or 70 beats per minute, on time, all the time."

PBS also delves into the relatively new treatment of atrial fibrillation (AF) with ablation, suggesting patients can be cured of the electric disorder. In a segment using the Stereotaxis ablation system—where two large magnets guide magnetically tipped catheters to the source of AF, often within the pulmonary veins. The rhythm disturbance of AF can be completely cured, says Dr John Miller (University of Indiana Medical School).

Adds Zipes: "The application of ablation was absolutely revolutionary. When we do an ablation, you now leave the laboratory a healthy individual."