Greek heart patients will no longer have to travel abroad to treat chronic conditions from next year as doctors gear up for the first artificial heart transplants.

Surgeons say the procedure, successfully pioneered in the US in 2001, will be an important boon to a population suffering from rising rates of heart disease and low numbers of organ donors.

"We have a lot of sick people. And not a lot of (organ) donors. So there is a need for artificial hearts," said Christos Lolas, vice president of the Hellenic Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Society.

Transplant timeline

Greek doctors began performing heart transplants in 1990, and since then have done only about 10 per year, depending on the availability of donated hearts. But patient waiting lists can be up to 100 people, meaning that 10 times the number who receive transplants will die while waiting for a donor. Artificial hearts could change all that.

The grapefruit-sized mechanical hearts, made of metal and silicone, act as hydraulic pumps, drawing in blood and moving it through chambers constructed like an actual heart. They are kept pumping by a battery implanted in the body, which is charged by an external battery pack worn a few hours per day.

Athens Evangelismos hospital will be the first of Greeces 15 heart transplant facilities to be equipped for artificial heart transplants. The Health Ministry has agreed to foot the 293,500 euro bill for the equipment. Each transplant operation is expected to cost 73,400 euros.

"At first, doctors will likely perform 10-15 artificial heart transplants per year at most," said Lolas (though small, that amount will still more than double the number of annual Greek heart transplants).

But if the transplants are successful, he hopes to up that number to 70 per year.

Heart disease on the rise

In the early '90s, studies showed that in some areas of Greece, such as Crete, rates of heart disease were noticeably lower than elsewhere in the world. But evidence for the country as a whole shows that heart disease appears to be rising. According to Lolas' figures, about 400,000 people in Greece suffer from heart disease, and doctors perform 8,500 open-heart surgeries per year.

"Proportionately for the population, we have the same amount of heart surgeries per year as the US," he said.

Studies have credited the Mediterranean diet, with its emphasis on unsaturated fats and vegetables, for keeping heart rates low in the past. But doctors say the increase in western diets and lifestyle, stress, and smoking, means those numbers may not hold out, especially in increasingly fast-paced modern cities.