Heart Hope

A middle-aged man is walking along a street, or standing in talk with a friend, or sitting with a magazine. Suddenly a look of surprise and terror wells into his face. He clutches at his heart, droops, collapses, in a few minutes is dead. "Heart failure," announces the ambulance doctor. "Coronary thrombosis," reports the autopsist. "A blood clot clogged one of the principal blood vessels of the heart muscle and caused it to fail," explains the family doctor. Not every victim of a heart attack dies instanter. But doctors almost universally are pessimistic about a heart victim living long thereafter. And the survivors live in continual apprehension.

Last week the top heart specialist of the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Frederick Arthur Willius, declared that pessimism and apprehension are only half warranted, that nine out of 20 victims of heart attacks survive a number of years. In the Journal of the American Medical Association Dr. Willius presented table after table of statistics taken from the Mayo Clinic's records of cardiac patients. These revealed that people who suffer an attack of coronary thrombosis between the ages of 30 and 40 have excellent chances of survival. This record contradicts "the comment frequently heard that coronary thrombosis in the early age periods is likely to be fatal, because . . . the heart is unprepared for the accident." Men in the 40's also have fair chances of living a few years after the "accident." Greatest danger occurs in the fifth and sixth decades of life. Several Mayo Clinic patients lived from 15 to 17 years after their heart attack. "A larger group lived from seven to twelve years." A few survived as many as four heart attacks, proving that "the heart is often capable of making a remarkable recovery from probably the most terrific insult to which it is exposed and even from repetition of such insults."

Some of the thrombosed patients suffered with angina pectoris, pain in the chest often associated with hardening of the arteries. But most who died of coronary thrombosis died with no forewarning of heart trouble.

Seven men suffer coronary thrombosis to one woman. Women are stricken later in life than men. A first attack kills them more often than it does men. But, if a woman survives such a heart attack, she may expect to live three years longer than a man similarly stricken and surviving. Dr. Willius finds it "difficult to understand the reasons for the great discrepancy in incidence of coronary thrombosis between the two sexes. After a critical analysis of the known factors, one is obliged to seek a possible explanation in the presumable superior biologic heritage of the female."

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