Word: vagus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Although the heart is an automatic motor, it cannot govern its own speed. Two nerves and two body chemicals do that. The accelerator nerve and adrenalin (hormone of the adrenal glands) speed up the heart. The vagus nerve and acetylcholine (hormone produced by the vagus nerve) slow down the heart...
Cardiologists have a hard time coping with auricular or ventricular fibrillation, primarily because they are not certain how the condition develops. Only positive factor known was that the vagus and accelerator nerve controls were involved. Last week Dr. Louis Herman Nahum, Yale associate physiologist, and H. E. Hoff, onetime Yale physiology instructor and now a Harvard medical student, set forth before the New Haven Medical Association a theory and a treatment based on new research...
Overactivity of the vagus nerve is tied up with overactivity of the thyroid. Goitres, said Drs. Nahum and Hoff last week, "change the heart in such a way as to make it susceptible to overactivity of the vagus nerve. Some patients are naturally subject to vagus action. Some develop it reflexly from high blood pressure and it is probable that all hyper-thyroids are sensitive to the vagus nerve. In this way, overactivity of this nerve develops, which precipitates auricular fibrillation...
...Hoff advise elimination of poisons, physical disturbances and excitements; use of barbiturates or other drugs which reduce the heart's activity; administration of oxygen. In extremity, a surgeon might cut the nerves which cause the adrenal glands to excrete their exciting adrenalin. But drugstores now carry acetylcholine, the vagus hormone, with which a desperate doctor can often quiet ventricular fibrillation, set the heart pulsating smoothly again...