Word: embolus
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Recently Sir Thomas Lewis, eminent London heart specialist, made a special study of how an arm or leg dies when an embolus (floating clot) plugs a main artery which feeds blood to that limb. Competent heart specialists and surgeons generally see such blood-starved limbs too late to save them from gangrene and amputation. Last week, by chance, a Chicago doctor, Geza deTakats, in the American Journal of Surgery, and a Toronto doctor, Donald Walton Gordon Murray, in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, each gave explicit directions for locating such a destructive clot, removing it by surgery, thus saving...
...peripheral arteries is one of the most urgent surgical emergencies. Acute appendicitis, intestinal obstruction, perforated viscus, etc., while better treated at the first possible moment, usually will not be followed by the disastrous results from waiting six to eight hours that may be expected from neglect of an embolus for the same length of time...
...manifest gangrene, or on patients in whom the underlying disease is apt to be fatal shortly, as in septic endocarditis or terminal cardiac decompensation." Dr. Murray: "There are few operations in surgery so eminently satisfactory in selected cases or attended by such potentiality for good as embolectomy for arterial embolus...
...major operation. A blood clot (thrombus) breaks loose from its anchorage, floats with the blood stream until it gets stuck in an artery. Most frequent sites of this plugging are the common femoral artery in the groin (39%) and the common iliac artery in the lower abdomen (15%). Embolus here stops circulation in the entire leg and foot. Other frequent sites for emboli are the brachial artery in the elbow, affecting the forearm and hand; the popliteal (10%), affecting the lower leg and foot; the aorta, affecting the entire body...
...anything happens to these coronary arteries, the heart muscles are quickly poisoned and cease to function. Result: Death. The most serious thing that can happen to these arteries is sudden clogging of the blood flow. This may occur when: 1) a blood clot floating through the circulatory system (i.e., embolus) jams in a coronary artery; or 2) disease so roughens the smooth wall of a coronary artery that blood cells accumulate like silt on a river bar (i. e., thrombus). In either case the victim of coronary thrombosis, who may think he is suffering from acute indigestion, often drops dead...