Word: heart
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tabulate the results automatically. Genetic researchers are already talking about using "FISH [for fluorescent in-situ hybridization] and chips," as they whimsically call these new tools, to look for any number of genetic characteristics, including the more elusive web of genes that may lurk behind familial patterns of heart disease and stroke, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, various kinds of mental disorders and even gingivitis. Says Dr. Wayne Grody, head of the DNA diagnostic lab at the UCLA Medical Center: "We'll soon be governed by a new paradigm--genomic medicine--with tests and ultimately treatment for every disease linked...
Insurers make their money by spreading risk over as large a population as they can, calculating that the healthy will pay for the sick--and then some. Unless state law prohibits, they can discriminate--legally--by raising premiums for someone who, for example, has suffered a heart attack and is renewing an individual or small-group policy. Access to a growing body of predictive genetic information would permit insurers to weed out further the riskiest, hence costliest clients or at least make them pay more for their coverage even before illness strikes. Little wonder that insurers would like to know...
Eight years after the heart-bypass operation that saved his life, Floyd Stokes was in deep trouble again. His angina had returned with a vengeance. He was gulping nitroglycerine tablets and was virtually incapacitated, unable to do simple chores on his Seminole, Texas, ranch. Too far gone for another bypass, he had a choice, as he puts it, of "just waiting for death or trying to do something about...
Stokes chose to survive. He volunteered to take part in a novel clinical trial about to be conducted on heart patients by Dr. Jeffrey Isner at the St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Boston. To his surprise, he was accepted. Last May he flew to Boston, where a solution containing billions of copies of a gene that triggers blood-vessel growth was injected directly into his heart...
...three weeks, Stokes was feeling better and now, at 58, he is back at work on a normal, nitroglycerine-free routine. "I ride horses and I run tractors," he says. "You have to be in pretty good shape to do what I do." As it turned out, all 16 heart patients in Isner's trial showed improvement, and six are entirely free of pain...