Word: cardiac
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Each year 300,000 people in the U.S. die from cardiac arrest, usually caused by uncontrolled contraction of muscle fibers in the heart's pumping chambers. Known as ventricular fibrillation, these attacks cut off circulation and halt the flow of blood to the brain. Only powerful electrical shocks administered directly to the chest or heart with bulky machines called defibrillators seem to stop such life-threatening episodes. But all too often, victims are stricken at home or in the streets and help does not arrive in time...
...brain swells and thinking becomes fuzzy. Gradually, the body becomes dehydrated, losing important electrolytes and the ability to cool itself. Then the blood flows sluggishly, and kidneys and other major organs begin shutting down; eventually the victim sinks into a coma and is susceptible to cardiac arrest...
...Lear, Martha's husband, a physician and a man of intelligence and sensitivity. The pain that woke him was the onset of his first heart attack. Before Dr. Lear's death four years later, he was to suffer every indignity open to victims of cardiac disease. Worse, as a doctor he understood exactly what was happening to him, so that he was not even granted the anesthesia of ignorance...
...daughter of Heart Surgeon Burakovsky. The patient, herself a doctor, had entered a general hospital in Moscow with abdominal pain, but then, as can happen in hospitals anywhere, "she got into trouble," says Zapol. She apparently had an infected fallopian tube and then a "misadventure" with anesthesia, followed by cardiac arrest and blood infection. When Zapol arrived in Moscow, she was having difficulty breathing and her chances of survival seemed slim...
During the first five years of research, the center introduced several innovations to aid cardiac patients, including blood clot-dissolving enzymes, the insertion of a balloon into the aorta to help pump blood, and the use of radioactive thalium 20 to differentiate healthy heart cells from irreversibly damaged ones...