Word: patiently
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Recent advances in diagnosis and treatment will make damaged hearts easier to mend in the decade ahead. Sophisticated new machines allow doctors to "see" a patient's heart without surgery. Major strides have been made in understanding how the heart works and why disease occurs. These in turn have led to breakthroughs in the operating theater and the drug research laboratory. Says Cardiologist Eugene Braunwald of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Beth Israel in Boston: "There's been more done in cardiology research in the past ten years than in its entire previous history." Roman DeSanctis...
...most familiar advance dates from 1967, when surgeons performed the first bypass operation on a patient with a coronary artery blockage. In the procedure, a vein taken from the patient's leg is grafted to the aorta and to the unobstructed portion of the coronary artery, thus detouring blood around the blocked area...
...best way to do that is to detect the disease before it has grown desperate. Today physicians are refining their diagnostic techniques at a remarkable pace. A decade ago, they checked for heart disease by taking a patient's history, doing a physical examination and ordering chest X rays, electrocardiograms and angiograms. X-ray films and EKGs give general information about the heart's structure and electrical activity, respectively. Angiograms, special X-ray pictures made by injecting a radiopaque substance through a thin tube inserted into the heart or coronary arteries, provide more accurate information about constrictions...
...information into pictures. For example, by using thallium 201, an isotope that lodges in healthy heart muscle, doctors can tell if tissue has died as a result of a heart attack and whether blood is flowing freely through the coronary arteries. The test is usually performed first while the patient is exercising on a treadmill or bicycle and then while resting. Similarly, physicians can radioactively label components of the blood, like red cells, to see how efficiently the organ is pumping...
Clot-Dissolving Streptokinase. Cardiologists are excited about an experimental technique that may be able to stop a blood clot-caused heart attack right in its tracks, and perhaps minimize damage to heart tissue. Says Garrett Lee of the University of California, Davis Medical Center: "Ten years ago, a patient admitted to the hospital would have been taken to the coronary care unit and continued to be monitored. It would be bed rest, oxygen and drugs to prevent such complications as arrhythmias and heart failure-but the heart attack would run its course." With this new technique doctors try to interrupt...