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HEART doctors are urging the NHS to invest in a tiny gadget that could save 100,000 lives a year.

Britain is near the bottom of the European and world league in the use of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs).

The tiny devices, the size of a matchbox, are implanted under the skin of heart patients.

They work by delivering a mini-electric shock to prevent a heart attack.

At present most heart patients with abnormal heart beats are treated with drugs. But these don't always work and they have major side-effects.

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence has carried out research into ICDs and recommends their routine use - claiming they are more effective than drug treatments.

But a major stumbling block to their introduction is their individual cost - pounds 30,000 each.

Ministers are baulking at a bill of pounds 30million a year to buy and install ICDs. Cliff Bucknall, a cardiologist at St Thomas's Hospital, London, said: "We must have the same care provided in the US and Germany, but it comes down to cash."

The ICD is implanted in the lower chest muscle, with one or more leads passed through into the heart.

Clinical trials conducted in Britain and America show that in many cases ICDs save more lives than conventional drug therapies - reducing the risk of dying by at least 30 per cent The current number of ICD implants in the UK is 13 per million people -less than almost every other EC country.

Mark Wendruff, 52, a chauffeur from Stanmore, Middlesex, had an ICD device fitted five years ago after a cardiac arrest and says it has already saved his life once.

He said: "Without the ICD I'd have been a goner. No question."

MARTYN HALLE,  Sunday Mirror, 01-21-2001, pp 40.

{Comment by Skyaid: There is currently no way to determine who needs to have an ICD.  
ICDs are too expensive to implant on most of the elderly population}

see also ICD in WSJ 3/20/01