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> Heart transplants are apparently not the answer to severe cardiac disease: of some 200 patients round the world who have been given new hearts, only 26, or 13%, are still alive. But transplants do seem to be the solution for many of those who suffer from serious kidney problems. A report published in the

A.M.A. Journal by the Renal Transplant Registry, which keeps track of most of the kidney transplants performed throughout the world, reveals that the odds of survival following a transplant are excellent, particularly if the procedure is done in a large medical center that handles 25 or more of the operations a year. The registry checked on 10,357 of the 12,389 transplant operations done between 1951 and the end of 1972; it found that 4,934, or 47.6%, of the patients were alive. In fact, more than 60 of the women had recovered so fully that they had conceived and delivered children since their operations.

-- It is well known that cigarette smokers are more susceptible than non-smokers to heart attacks caused by arterial thrombosis, or clotting. A physician at Tufts-New England Medical Center now suggests why. Dr. Peter Levine reports in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, that smoking accelerates the activity of platelets, the blood components that aid in the clotting process by sticking together. Levine bases his finding on an 18-month study of 27 healthy male and female volunteers who had blood samples drawn from their arms every ten minutes during the test periods. Once the subjects' usual clotting rates were determined, they were asked to smoke so that Levine could measure any changes. The physician found no significant change in platelet activity after the volunteers smoked cigarettes made of lettuce leaves, which contain no nicotine, or when they dragged on unlit cigarettes. But only five minutes after smoking a standard filter cigarette, all showed an increased tendency to form clots.

>Earlier this year the American Cancer Society asked the Gallup organization to poll the attitudes of American women toward breast cancer. The results of the survey of 1,007 women over 18 years old show that women are so terrified of breast cancer-and of the possibility that a breast will have to be removed-that they exaggerate both the prevalence and danger of the disease. Sixty-two percent of those polled, for example, thought that a blow or injury to the breast could cause cancer (false), and 43% believed that birth control pills could lead to malignancies (unsupported by scientific evidence). When asked to estimate the number of women out of every 1,000 who develop breast cancer, more than half guessed 100 or more (the figure is closer to 50). Despite these fears, only 18% of the women performed a monthly self-examination (46% felt it would worry them unnecessarily), while close to half did not even have annual breast examinations by a physician. That significantly lessened their chances of early detection of disease, which is essential in controlling breast cancer.

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