Dick Cheney’s Medical History Traces Milestones in Heart Care - NYTimes.com
4/24/12 4:00 PM
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Cheney File Traces Heart Care Milestones
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Former Vice President Dick Cheney in Cheyenne, Wyo., after his heart transplant.
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. Published: April 23, 2012
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WASHINGTON — For a man who has long battled advanced heart disease, Dick Cheney has had a remarkable streak of being in the right place at the right time. Now 71, the former vice president has survived five heart attacks, the first of them at the age of 37. Even before he received a heart transplant a month ago today, Mr. Cheney had benefited from just about every procedure, technology and class of drug available to people with his condition — atherosclerosis, in which fatty deposits block blood flow in the arteries.
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Indeed, Mr. Cheney’s medical history could almost be the history of medical progress against heart disease, the leading cause of death in this country and many others. Most of the advances have come during his lifetime, through taxpayer investment in research financed by the National Institutes of Health and through private investment by industry and entrepreneurs.
Dick Cheney’s Medical History Traces Milestones in Heart Care - NYTimes.com
4/24/12 4:00 PM
It was 100 years ago that doctors first diagnosed heart attacks in living patients and learned that they were not inevitably fatal. (Damage from attacks had long been detected in autopsies.) In time, doctors learned the myriad symptoms that can accompany a heart attack — among them indigestion, heartburn and, most commonly, pain in the chest, jaw and arm — and correlated them with electrocardiogram readings. Still, for decades, doctors could do little for such patients beyond providing morphine for pain relief; digitalis to help a failing heart pump more forcefully; and oxygen tents to help breathing. Consider President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s care in 1955, when at 64 he experienced chest pains at 2:30 a.m. while on vacation at his mother-in-law’s home in Denver. The White House physician, Dr. Howard M. Snyder, a surgeon, ordered the president’s wife, Mamie, to snuggle with her husband in bed to keep him warm. Not until the next afternoon did Dr. Snyder perform an electrocardiogram or call for an ambulance. Eisenhower spent four weeks in bed and then three more weeks
