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Cardiac Catheterization
| Article
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12397 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1987 |
2,800 Words |
| Author
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Michael Woods
Michael Woods, a contributing editor for THE WORLD & I, has
received numerous science-writing awards. |
Cardiac catheterization is the single most definitive test in the diagnosis of many forms of heart disease, the industrialized world's number one killer.
More than 500,000 people will undergo the test this year in the United States alone. Indeed, several years ago cardiac catheterization surpassed hernia repair as the most common surgical procedure in middle-aged men, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The test, which involves threading a long, flexible tube - a catheter - through a vein and into the heart, is safe, highly accurate, and provides physicians with a cornucopia of diagnostic information. With it physicians can determine with great precision whether chest pain is caused by potentially lethal blockages in the coronary arteries or by other less serious disorders.
Thus, it is a routine prelude to open-heart surgery - including bypass surgery that can shunt blood around narrowed portions of the coronary arteries, the replacement of defective heart valves, and the repair of other defects. Dr. Willis Hurst, one of the world's renowned cardiologists, recently called the procedure "the greatest advance of the century in heart diagnostic technology."
Yet, for a perilous decade after the first human cardiac catheterization - performed under circumstances so bizarre that the details still cause shock and disbelief - the procedure was ignored by physicians. Indeed, it seemed destined for the junkheap of medical innovations, the resting place for all broken dreams, useless panaceas, elixirs, gadgets, and other curiosities that have emerged from the fertile minds of aspiring medical innovators.
Cardiac catheterization was rescued from that fate, and transformed into an enormously useful tool of clinical medicine by two remarkable Nobel laureates whose work has extended the lives of millions of people. They are Dr. Andre F. Cournand, who was ninety-one on September 24, 1986, and the late Dr. Dickinson W. Richards.
A profile of Cournand, the only surviving member of the group, appears on page 242.
Cournand and Richards shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology with Dr. Werner Forssmann, who as a twenty-five-year-old German surgeon in training at an obscure hospital, performed the first cardiac catheterization on a human. His patient for the historic feat could not have been more carefully selected
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