Word: clots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DIAGNOSIS Scanning the Lungs For Blood Clots Whenever a large blood clot blocks the artery leading from the heart to the lungs, the result is so dramatic and catastrophic - in many cases, fatal -that doctors find the difficulty relatively easy to diagnose. But small clots that block some of the smaller arterial branches are far more common than such massive pulmonary embolisms. The trouble is, they are so hard to detect that the true nature of the illness is often missed. Patients complain of shortness of breath, they faint frequently, and they may collapse after exertion, leaving their doctors baffled...
...Squibb & Sons, Dr. Taplin found what he wanted: human albumin, but in a special form made up of large molecules too big to pass through the lungs' blood filters, and laced with radioactive iodine. Dr. Taplin proved in dogs that these macro-molecules would jam up in the clot-closed arteries, stay there long enough to take their own picture on an X-ray plate, then break up into the normal, small-molecule form of albumin and pass into the bloodstream...
...answer to an age-old problem: how to stop bleeding in a brain artery. These hemorrhages, usually at a spot where a cerebral artery has ballooned out and leaked or burst, are notoriously hard to shut off promptly. The most obvious plug for a burst artery is a blood clot, but with a clot the problem is how to make it and how to keep it from traveling and causing still more brain damage. Dr. Mullan and fellow workers noted that not only does electricity promote clotting, but also, unaccountably, so does a piece of copper, cadmium or beryllium, even...
...system of X rays (see photos). The tip is the positive electrode for a minute current. The negative electrode is attached outside the skull. Within half an hour the iron in the electrode is "plated off" (in effect, dissolved), and much of it goes into the electrically induced blood clot that seals the artery...
With electrodes of steel, the electro-coagulation method offers the advantage of forming a clot quickly. This constitutes a sort of neurosurgical first aid for the aneurysm patient, enough to tide him over the first and most dangerous days after a hemorrhage. But clots formed in this way are apt not to be permanent, whereas if a piece of copper is implanted in the aneurysm and left there for a week, without an electric current, it forms a more permanent clot. So Dr. Mullan's team is now combining the two methods: forming a quick clot by electricity...