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...Adrian Kantrowitz, 90, performed the first human-heart transplant in the U.S., in 1967. The patient, an infant, received a heart from another child but lived only 6 1/2 hours after the surgery. Despite the loss, Kantrowitz's work ushered in a new era in approaches to heart illness...
...broader application of the procedure will depend on making it less expensive. One way to do that, says Hollander: developing automatic processes, rather than the labor-intensive techniques applied this time, for generating tissue from the patient's own stem cells. Once scientists are able to engineer similar transformations of other organs to save lives and spare the side effects of immunosuppressive drugs, "This would be beautiful," says Macchiarini...
...solution to overdiagnosis, says Aaron, is simple: consistent, objective testing to identify asthma more accurately. A spirometry test, for example, measures the rate and volume of airflow during the patient's exhale, before and after using an inhaler. "If you came in with chest pain, [the physician] would do an electrocardiogram. If you came in complaining of high cholesterol they would do a blood test. But we're not measuring asthma before we start to throw medicines at it. We're making the diagnosis on spec, as it were...
...there is an established and often successful history in medicine of diagnosis by treatment. Says Edelman so-called "therapeutic trials" of asthma medication may be appropriate, based on a patient's symptoms and medical history - even without pulmonary tests. "If a 12-year-old kid comes into your office and says he wheezes every time he goes near his friend's dog, and you give him an inhaler and it never happens again, that's a therapeutic trial," he says...
...best advocates for patients diagnosed with asthma are the patients themselves, says Aaron. If you suspect that you may have been misdiagnosed, ask your doctor to run some pulmonary tests or pursue a different course of treatment. As Aaron says, "The danger of misdiagnosis is that it's a missed opportunity to figure out what's truly wrong with the patient...