Children's Hospital Colorado

Implanting a Leadless Pacemaker in Pediatrics

1/12/2024 1 min. read

Children’s Hospital Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus at dusk.

Traditional pacemakers rely on intravenous wires, or leads, to deliver electrical pulses to parts of a person’s heart and regulate their heartbeat. While pacemakers are necessary in patients with an abnormally slow heartbeat, their wires can cause a host of serious complications if they become infected, dislodged or fractured. Leadless pacemakers were developed to provide a safer alternative for patients who need their heartbeat regulated in certain situations.

In July 2023, the Children’s Hospital Colorado Heart Institute became one of the first pediatric teams in the world to implant the AVEIR Leadless Pacemaker. Children’s Colorado’s pediatric electrophysiologists Dustin Nash, MD, and Johannes von Alvensleben, MD, implanted the novel leadless pacemaker into an 18-year-old patient’s heart. He was the perfect candidate for a leadless pacemaker because he has a severe form of vasovagal syncope — a condition that caused his heart rate to drop rapidly in response to stress.

Now, the leadless pacemaker monitors his heart at all times but only kicks in to pace his heart rate when it detects a sudden change. Without the movement restrictions and recovery processes that typically come with an ordinary pacemaker, the patient — a collegiate soccer player entering his freshman year — was back on the field acing fitness tests just four weeks later.

The success of this implantation shows great promise not only for pediatric patients with vasovagal syncope, but also for those with intermittent heart block, seizure abnormalities and other congenital heart conditions that don’t need constant pacing. Another benefit of a leadless pacemaker for pediatric patients is that they offer a longer battery life, reducing the need for surgeries as the child grows.

In the case of this young athlete, his AVEIR Leadless Pacemaker is expected to last 18 years. And since the device is designed to be removed, his future replacements will continue to be minimally invasive with faster recovery times.

"It was really nice to have this option for our patient rather than the ones that we've traditionally had,” Dr. Nash says. “The leadless pacemaker checked all the boxes that we needed.”