Word: bypasser
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...years David Rasmussen, 72, a retired airline dispatcher living in Clarksville, Va., had solved at least one crossword puzzle a day. But for a while after he underwent double-bypass surgery at Duke University Medical Center last October, Rasmussen hardly glanced at his beloved crosswords. "I found it hard to concentrate," Rasmussen recalls. "All I wanted to do was sit around and watch television...
...could hardly blame him. After all, Rasmussen had had his chest cracked open, his heart stitched up and was swimming in painkillers. Is it any wonder that he--and 30% to 80% of the more than 500,000 Americans who undergo bypass each year--would experience bouts of mental fogginess after surgery? Most surgeons assumed these effects were temporary, since they usually disappeared a few weeks or months after the operation--as they did in Rasmussen's case. Besides, doctors tended to focus on the more pressing bypass complications--stroke, for example, which occurs in 1% to 5% of cases...
...there has always been a nagging suspicion that the subtle changes in personality and lapses in mental acuity that are sometimes seen after bypass surgery might be the result of brain damage caused by the operation itself. That's why there was so much interest last week in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found 42% of bypass patients still experienced cognitive decline five years later...
...about a third did not. In general, patients who were older, less well educated or who had previously experienced mental confusion in the aftermath of the surgery appeared to be at greatest risk of a long-term decline. (Vice President Dick Cheney was 47 when he underwent quadruple-bypass surgery in 1988.) What surprised Newman's team most, however, was that the rate of impairment, after falling to 24% in the first six months, subsequently rose, suggesting that the apparent damage in many cases was permanent...
...Justice Department, career prosecutors are also burning over the clemency grant for Manhattan lawyer Harvey Weinig, sentenced in 1996 to 11 years in prison for facilitating an extortion-kidnapping scheme and helping launder at least $19 million for the Cali cocaine cartel. In Weinig's case, Clinton didn't bypass the Department of Justice - he defied...