Word: debakey
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...what can be done about narrowed arteries in the neck, where the surgeon can get at them. From 5% to 20% of strokes (doctors differ widely about the proportion) occur not in the brain but in the carotid arteries in the neck. Houston's Dr. Michael E. DeBakey has pioneered with a series of operations to restore full blood flow through a narrowed carotid-by installing a bypass, or cutting out the narrowed stretch, or putting in a patch graft to widen the artery. But evaluation of stroke victims' recovery is so difficult that no fewer than...
...with the ophthalmodynamometer until the patient reports that he cannot see out of that eye. The instrument registers the pressure at which vision was cut off. This in turn indicates the pressure in the internal carotid artery and shows whether that vessel is dangerously narrowed. If it is, a DeBakey operation may prove to be the answer...
...four ascending arteries (two carotid, two vertebral) that carry blood toward the brain from the aorta's arch, just above the heart, are subject to the same types of disease as other major arteries, and they should, insisted Houston's famed surgeon Michael DeBakey (TIME, June 22, 1959), be treated the same way. If the disease is true hardening of the middle layer of the artery walls, surgery can do nothing about it. If the disease is atherosclerosis (not hardening, but clogging with fatty material), affecting only a short stretch of the ascending carotid or vertebral arteries...
Still pushing for further progress, Mike DeBakey gets less than five hours sleep a night, rises at 4:30 to work on reports before going to surgery at 7:30, has taken off only two weekends (to hunt deer) in four years. Lean, slightly stooped and with big, penetrating dark eyes, he is so miserly of time that he never drives when he can fly, never walks when he can drive -even the one block from medical school to hospital...
Last week, in Atlantic City, N.J. for the A.M.A. meeting. Perfectionist DeBakey phoned his secretary to check on patients, added a complaint: he had no white tie and tails with him, had to rent them for a ceremony. The House of Delegates, he explained as an afterthought, had just voted him its 1959 Distinguished Service Award. A gold medal with citation, it is the A.M.A.'s highest recognition for outstanding contributions to medical progress...