Word: blankenhorn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Republican meaning of family values tends to point toward a cultural ideal (two-parent heterosexual households, hard work, no pornography, a minimal tolerance of the aberrant). Says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values: "Republicans really do want to argue about the culture. They want to argue about morality, what's right and wrong, standards of private behavior. They really do want to argue about sexuality, procreation and marriage...
...many cases, bypass surgery or angioplasty will remain the strategy of choice. There are those with advanced heart disease, says Blankenhorn, "who clearly can't wait. If they try therapy alone when they really need surgery, they can have a disastrous outcome -- a catastrophic heart attack." But others, with less serious cases, may be able to avoid surgery -- if they are willing to make radical changes in their diet and life-style...
While trials beginning in the 1950s had shown that drugs and diet could reverse atherosclerosis in laboratory animals, Blankenhorn's groundbreaking work, begun in 1980, was the first controlled study demonstrating that the same results could be produced in humans. His subjects were 188 nonsmoking males who had undergone bypass surgery. (Most heart-disease research has been done on men rather than women.) Blankenhorn placed half of them on a diet containing 22% fat and gave them colestipol and large doses of niacin, both standard cholesterol-reducing drugs. The other recruits, the control group, merely limited the fat content...
...drug-taking group realized what Blankenhorn terms a "spectacular reduction" in their total cholesterol, and 16% of them showed decreases in their arterial plaque. "As long as you don't batter arteries with cigarettes and high cholesterol," he concluded, "they have a remarkable healing ability...
While these results convinced both Blankenhorn and Brown that reduced cholesterol was the major contributor to the reversal, Ornish has his doubts. "If lowering cholesterol were the primary factor in causing reversal of heart disease," he notes in his book, "most of the patients in the studies by Dr. Blankenhorn and Dr. Brown who were taking cholesterol-lowering drugs should have shown reversal, since almost all of these patients had substantial decreases in blood-cholesterol levels. Yet only a minority showed reversal...