Word: heart
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...widely heralded but still experimental cancer-fighting compound may be used someday to prevent two other major killers of Americans: heart disease and stroke. That was the implication of a remarkable report published last week in the journal Circulation by a team of researchers from Dr. Judah Folkman's laboratory at the Children's Hospital in Boston...
...drug that is apparently effective against tumors also reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke? The answer lies in the composition of plaque, the fatty deposit that builds up in arteries and can eventually clog them. Plaque consists of a mix of cholesterol, white blood cells and smooth muscle cells, and as it accumulates, a network of capillaries sprouts from the artery walls to nourish the cells. Could endostatin halt the growth of capillaries and starve the plaque...
...team led by Dr. Karen Moulton decided to find out. The scientists put baby lab mice on a 16-week "Western diet" that was high in fat and cholesterol, then measured the plaque buildup on the walls of each aorta, the large artery that carries blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Meanwhile, they injected one group of mice with endostatin, another with a different blood-vessel inhibitor called TNP-470 and a control group with an inert saline solution. Twenty weeks later the researchers again measured plaque in the mouse aortas. The results were startling...
...aware of the premature hopes raised last year after Folkman's tumor report, the researchers have been careful not to oversell the new results. "If this finding is supported in future studies," says Moulton, "[it could open the way for] treatments that could delay the progression of heart disease and possibly reduce the incidence of heart attacks and strokes." But any such treatments, she stresses, are probably five to 10 years away...
...occasionally accused of having backtracked on memes, of having lost heart, pulled in my horns, had second thoughts. The truth is that my first thoughts were more modest than some memeticists might wish. For me the original mission was negative. The word was introduced at the end of a book that otherwise must have seemed entirely devoted to extolling the "selfish" gene as the be-all and end-all of evolution, the fundamental unit of selection. There was a risk that my readers would misunderstand the message as being necessarily about DNA molecules. On the contrary, DNA was incidental...