The Healthy Heart [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1 The great plague of the 20th Century A pump to fill the Astrodome When the plumbing breaks down Waxing and waning of a world epidemic The heart specialists' wizardry There is good news about the heart and blood vessels. Their afflietions are coming under control. In much of the world, death rates from these diseases are decreasing. Not in all the world: For reasons no one understands, death rates from some of the diseases are level in some countries, such as England and Wales, and they are rising in others, such as Yugoslavia and Poland. But the rule holds up in most of the industrialized countries, from Japan, which has always had little heart disease, to Finland, which has the world's most. What is more, the greatest improvement in controlling circulatory afflictions is taking place in the worst ailment: heart attack, in which the victim's heart, starved of blood, dies in part or completely. In the United States, heart attack deaths started to drop in the mid-1960s. During the next decade they dropped by about 25 per cent—the largest decline in the world. And the drop took place in every age group, every race and both sexes. Good news, indeed—and it came at a time when good news about the heart and its life-sustaining connections was desperately needed. For in the 20th Century, they had fallen prey, suddenly and without explanation, to a disastrous epidemic of disorders. In 1969 the World Health Organization called it "the most serious epidemic facing mankind." And even now, despite all the comforting progress of recent years, such diseases remain the leading cause of death in industrialized nations. The enormity of the epidemic can be sketched in grim numbers. In France nearly five million people were found to have cardiovascular disease in just one year. In Northern Ireland, with a population of only 1.5 million, approximately 7,500 people have heart attacks each year, and some 3,000 of them die. In the United States more than 40 million men, women and children have something wrong with their hearts or blood vessels. About a million die each year. For every American who dies of cancer, the second-ranking cause of death, three die of heart-related disease. And though the human costs cannot be reckoned, the economic cost—expenditures for medical services, and losses in earnings and production—has been calculated in the United States. It is astronomical; more than $40 billion a year. These stark statistics make clear the importance of the recent victories over what physicians call cardiovascular ailments. Many explanations have been offered for those victories. Some fatalists suggest that epidemics simply come and go inexplicably, and that this one will disappear as mysteriously as the Black Death of the Middle Ages. More persuasive explanations are based on new knowledge about the heart and blood system and on new methods of fighting or preventing their disorders. Some of these methods are medical—innovations in intensive hospital care, new drugs and sophisticated surgery. Perhaps most important to the waning of the epidemic, however, are not things that doctors and nurses do, but things that ordinary people—healthy or sick—do for themselves. The new knowledge of the heart and blood vessels has identified certain habits of everyday living—smoking, diet and