Backward Flow

The heart is a pump but also a living organ: while it is pumping blood to the rest of the body, it has to keep up its own blood supply. When it fails to get enough blood, there is trouble. Plugging of a coronary artery (coronary thrombosis) is one of the commonest reasons why the heart fails to get enough blood.

For some 16 years Dr. Claude S. Beck of Cleveland's Western Reserve University has been trying to find a safe way to give back enough blood to a starving heart to keep it going. A new Beck technique is reported in a recent Journal of the American Medical Association.

After 700 operations on 350 dogs, Dr. Beck was ready last January for a human patient. First he cut a piece about two inches long out of the brachial artery, which supplies the arm; the arm has plenty of blood supply and would not be crippled. Then he used the borrowed segment to make a new channel connecting the aorta, the body's main artery, with the coronary sinus, the heart's main vein. He thus reversed the normal course of the blood and made it flow backward.. In effect, he turned a vein into an artery; the heart's capillaries got a new supply of oxygenated blood fresh from the lungs (revascularization). The patient was "terminal" (in doctors' jargon, would have died anyway), but showed enough temporary improvement before he died to make the operation look promising.

Last week, Dr. Beck was giving lessons in the new operation to two resident surgeons at Cleveland's Lakeside Hospital. They will start operating within two or three months on a waiting list of several hundred non-terminal patients.

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