Word: aorta
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...open-heart surgery. First Litwak and his team insert two cannulae, or tubes, of flexible silicone into the patient's open chest. One tube is stitched into his left atrium, to draw off blood before it reaches the ventricle (see diagram). The second tube is connected to the aorta, to return pumped blood to general circulation. The tubes are then led down through the surgical incision in the chest and placed under the skin of the upper abdomen...
When the tune comes to take the patient off the conventional heart-lung machine and close his incision, the ends of the tubes are connected to a simple roller pump. The pump draws oxygenated blood from the left atrium and injects it forcibly into the aorta. The first time the system was used, the pump was doing 65% of the heart's work three hours after the operation. By the fifth hour, the heart had recovered sufficiently to perform 50% of its normal function. By the twelfth hour, the heart was carrying 78%, and by the 42nd hour...
...their increasing ability to control high blood pressure, doctors are still not sure what causes it. Some cases of hypertension stem from kidney disease. Others can be traced to a condition called coarctation or pinching of the aorta, the main artery leading from the heart. A handful of cases have been attributed to pheochromocytomas and other tumors on the adrenal glands that cause overproduction of certain hormones involved in blood-pressure control. But all these conditions together probably do not account for more than 5% of hypertension victims. Most cases are described by doctors as "essential" -medical jargon meaning...
...heart muscle, partly to make room for the implant. He placed the donor heart piggyback on Taylor's own, left side to left side, and cut silver-dollar-size holes in the left atrium (upper chamber) of each. Then he stitched the two hearts together and shunted the aorta from the donor heart into Taylor's aorta...
Died. Charles Evans Whittaker, 72, a former Supreme Court Justice; of a ruptured aorta; in Kansas City, Mo. A high school dropout who returned to school to study law, Whittaker rose to prominence as a Missouri trial lawyer and was appointed to the high court by Eisenhower in 1957. A judicial conservative, Whittaker consistently held claims of individual liberty to be outweighed by the needs of government, cast the deciding vote in 40 cases that ruled against an extension of civil rights and upheld actions against the Communist Party and alleged members. He resigned from the court...