Word: cardiologist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Institute has confirmed their doubts. The ambitious $24 million study, ten years in the making, found that about one in eight bypass patients would live just as long with drug treatment instead of surgery. "In the past we have tended to believe that the operation prolongs survival," says Detroit Cardiologist Thomas Killip, who helped direct the study. "Now we are more skeptical...
Nonetheless, bypass surgery did have some advantages. Says University of Ala bama Cardiologist William Rogers, a principal investigator in the study: "There are striking differences when one looks at the quality of life." Indeed, the bypass patients suffered fewer chest pains, had greater endurance on exercise tests and required less medication...
...ultimate result is that five years after surgery about half of all bypass patients are no better off than they were before, and many are candidates for a second bypass. "That second operation may be difficult and risky because the tissues are so damaged and scarred," explains noted Harvard Cardiologist Eugene Braunwald, chief of medicine at both Beth Israel Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. To avoid a second operation, Braunwald and a growing number of his colleagues believe that the first bypass should be put off as long as possible by controlling symptoms like angina...
There are other alternatives to the bypass. In the mid-1970s, Swiss Cardiologist Andreas Gruntzig developed an ingenious method of unclogging arteries using a small balloon. In angioplasty, now performed on about 12,000 patients a year, a narrow tube, or catheter, is threaded into the diseased artery until it reaches the clogged area. At that point a tiny balloon at the tip of the catheter is repeatedly inflated so that it flattens the deposits against the arterial wall and widens the channel...
Angioplasty works best on patients with only one blocked artery, but fails when the deposits are too hard to be compressed or cannot be reached with the catheter. For such cases another technique may soon be available. Taking his inspiration from the laser swords in Star Wars, Cardiologist Garrett Lee, of the Western Heart Institute in San Francisco, has developed a catheter similar to the one used in angioplasty but with the addition of a pinpoint laser...