Word: laragh
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Much of the credit for this successful treatment belongs to a perky professor of medicine named John Henry Laragh. Best known for untangling the hormonal relationships that control blood pressure, Laragh, 50, pioneered in the treatment of high blood pressure by founding the nation's first hypertension center, at Manhattan's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in 1971. Now he is expanding both his research and clinical interests into new fields. Last week he left Presbyterian Hospital, where he was vice chairman of the board of trustees for professional and scientific affairs, to assume an endowed professorship...
...Laragh's move comes at an appropriate time. Medicine is better equipped than it has ever been to handle hypertension. Yet the disease remains perhaps the most neglected of health problems. Many physicians, in fact, still believe that moderately elevated blood pressure need not be treated. Laragh is determined to change all that. "Hypertension does not have to be the single leading factor in disability and death in the U.S. today," he insists. "We have the means to control it. What we have to do is use them. We're ready for an all-out attack...
...Laragh, the explanation is obvious. "Salt is the hydraulic agent of life," he explains. "It is salt that holds the water in humans, causes swelling and a high fluid volume. This means an increased blood pressure." It does indeed. Doctors have known since 1900 that lowering salt intake drops a patient's blood pressure, and most doctors agree that Americans eat too much salt. One of the first things a doctor tells, or should tell, a hypertensive patient is to throw away his salt shaker...
...drug to another. Another problem was less easy to solve. Doctors had known for years that there are many forms of hypertension that affect different patients in a vast variety of ways. Some respond to one kind of treatment, others to something completely different. It remained for Dr. Laragh to show how to predict an individual patient's response to a particular drug...
...many ways, Laragh was an ideal man for the job. A native of Yonkers, N.Y. (his grandfather was mayor), Laragh had always admired his family physician and the seeming miracles he could perform. He soon found himself exposed even more closely to medicine; he and a younger sister were orphaned when they were in their teens and went to live with a physician uncle...