Word: platelet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Meanwhile the competition has been reaching dizzying new speeds. In Sunday's race, 27 skaters broke Heiden's old record. After Jansen, the best U.S. hope for a medal had been Sprinter Nick Thometz. But following months of battling a low blood-platelet count and a recent bout of the flu, he finished eighth in the 500 and 18th in the 1,000. That race went to the Soviet Union's Nikolai Guliaev in 1:13.03. The silver went to East Germany's Jens-Uwe Mey, already winner of the 500 with a 36.45 record. Finally on Saturday...
...restore the pathway, the body musters its repair troops, led by the platelets, tiny disc-shaped particles in the blood that help stop bleeding by promoting clotting. These "little plates" produce a chemical, thromboxane, that constricts blood vessels and signals other platelets to gather round. The platelets also manufacture a chemical that induces the artery's exposed underlying muscle cells to multiply. "If the injury is short-lived," says Russell Ross of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, "the proliferation process is reversible. But if the injury is chronic and repeated in the same sites...
...drug being studied as a platelet fighter is that old standby, aspirin. Results so far have been equivocal, but, says Goodman, "many doctors, including myself, tell patients with a very high risk of heart disease to take half an aspirin a day." A drug for possible future use is a synthetic version of prostacyclin, a chemical related to thromboxane but produced by the cells lining the artery and having exactly the opposite effect: it relaxes blood vessels and prevents platelets from clumping...
...family members must keep "a sense of the total person" in mind, says Conant. It is easy, but often harmful, to think of a patient only in terms of his illness, Conant believes, saying, "It's important to remember that you are dealing with a person, not just a platelet count." Howe stresses the need for all those involved with a terminally ill patient to show humor and perspective. He believes that his emotional state, as much as his physical state, helped affect his recovery...