Word: aorta
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...different vessels to carry blood to the heart muscle. Cleveland's Dr. Earle B. Kay reported that he and Dr. Akio Suzuki cut out a piece of the left lung's arterial network with "a multitude of side branches," and sew the "trunk" end into the descending aorta. Then they implant the smaller branches in the heart muscle. The advantage of this method, which has so far been successful in four out of six patients, said Dr. Kay, is that the blood vessels borrowed from the lung can be sewn into any part of the heart muscle...
...Walton Lillelehi's team from the University of Minnesota described a similar technique, using part of the network of veins from the patient's own thigh. The trunk vein is sewn into the aorta, and the branches are set in tunnels in the heart-wall muscle-tunnels through which a surgical knife has been run, deliberately cutting several small, transverse arteries, to open them up so that they can receive the new blood supply. Ten of these patients, said Dr. Randolph M. Ferlic, who suffered from crippling angina even when they were sitting down and not exerting themselves...
...without distress, and he complained that his legs kept "going to sleep." His blood pressure had soared to 240/140. Doctors could feel no pulse in his legs. Chief Surgeon Melvin Newman and his assistants at N.J.H. figured that their patient was suffering from a partial obstruction of his descending aorta- scar tissue, perhaps, from his knife wound...
When Dr. Newman's team operated they were startled to find not a partial obstruction but a complete blocklage of the aorta. Scar tissue was there as they had suspected, but it had evidently formed slowly, in successive layers. While it was forming, a dozen minor blood vessels on each side of the chest had had time to enlarge and supply "collateral circulation" to the lower part of the body (see diagram). Over the years, the blood vessels had quadrupled their capacity; they had shunted enough blood around the aorta block to keep Gormley alive...
...Newman and assistant surgeons cut out the clot-plugged section of aorta and replaced it with a Dacron graft. Now Gormley's feet and legs are no longer cold. His blood pressure is down to a healthy 130/80, and last week he was recuperating in Ogden, Utah, taking short walks to rebuild his strength. The man who should have been dead had made medical history. His is the first known case in which such generous collateral circulation compensated for a complete shutdown in the aorta...