HONG KONG, Feb. 17 (Xinhuanet) -- The Chinese University of Hong Kong has introduced a new treatment which effectively relieves symptoms of heart failure patients, announced the university here Friday.

    Heart failure patients have a weakening of the heart muscle's pumping function. In late stage heart failure, the heart enlarges progressively, making it more difficult to contract and pump blood effectively.

    Conventional treatment includes medications to control symptomsand hopefully prevent disease progression. But there has been no effective treatment for directly enhancing the pumping force or contractility of the heart.

    The new treatment, introduced by the university's Division of Cardiology of the Department of Medicine and Therapeutics, is called Cardiac Contractility Modulation (CCM). It is to implant a device that delivers intermittent electrical impulse to increase the contractility of the heart during native muscle contraction.

    The device delivers a current in special periods of the heart contraction interval to augment the pumping function of the heart.

    To date, nine patients in Hong Kong have received CCM therapy. All of them had successful CCM device implantation and so far all have reported an improvement of symptoms, a better quality of life and increase in exercise capacity. Enditem