Word: heparin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hematologists have long sought ways to prevent the formation of dangerous and possibly fatal blood clots. First there was heparin, extracted from the livers and lungs of beef cattle. Then came coumarins, made from rotted sweet clover. Now some British researchers believe they have found what they want in the venom of a Malayan pit viper, close kin to American rattlesnakes...
...trouble with heparin and some other anticoagulants is that they not only prevent clotting, but may overshoot the mark and make a patient liable to hemorrhage. Doctors in Malaya, treating victims of pit viper bites, noticed that they never seemed to have trouble with clots, and neither did they bleed excessively. Years of research to purify the active part of the venom yielded a substance named Arvin by London's Twyford Laboratories. Now, reports in the Lancet testify to the potential of Arvin, given intravenously...
...avoid the danger of clotting, the surgeons injected the anticoagulant heparin into the plastic tube leading blood away from the patient. But before it got back into the patient, where the clotting factor was necessary once more, the doctors gave it another injection, this time of protamine, to counteract the heparin...
What to Do. Once they have an accurate diagnosis, doctors can decide what the patient needs. In the severest cases, surgery with the heart-lung machine is called for; in others, oxygen to tide patients over a crisis. But for most victims, drugs are enough: heparin to guard against the formation of new clots, norepinephrine to keep up the blood pressure. Dr. Wagner has high hopes for a new enzyme to dissolve old clots...
...driving go-getter, he says, cannot clear his bloodstream fast enough of the triglycerides which accumulate after a high-fat meal. Unlike the more placid man, the go-getter uses too much of his body's heparin to break up the fat. There is not enough heparin (nature's anticoagulant) left to keep the red blood cells apart: "If, after every meal, a man has too many fat particles going around and red cells sludging and obstructing small blood vessels, the heart may be temporarily so embarrassed that this man will have a heart attack without a clot...