TREATMEN OF ANGINA

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 311, 30 November 1936, Page 2

TREATMEN OF ANGINA

INJECTION OF GROUND BEEF BONE. NEW BLOOD SUPPLY FOR HEART. A surgical operation taking new blood supplies to weakened hearts so that victims of angina pectoris and other heart ailments have been able to perform manual labour, was described at the 26th Congress of the American College of Surgeons in Philadelphia. Dr Claude S. Beck, Professor of Surgery at the Western Reserve University, Cleveland, described his work in creating new blood supplies for the heart muscles.

Man’s heart ailments, Professor Beck told his fellow-surgeons, largely arise from the fact that the two coronary arteries carrying blood to the heart muscles become filled with calcium deposits which cut down the blood supply reaching the heart tissues. Other animals have many more supply arteries for the heart. Professor Beck first overcame the deficiency, he claimed, by linking the heart and chest muscles, whereby blood vessels built themselves through adhesion of the tissues, carrying a full blood supply from the chest muscle into the heart muscle.

To simplify this process Professor Beck injects ground beef bone into the pericardium, the bag in which the heart lies, through a small incision in the chest.

The injected bone, the professor explains, irritates both the surface of the myocardium (the muscle fibre of the heart wall), and the surface of the pericardium. An inflammatory process of the issues is induced which causes the pericardium and the heart itself to stick together NEW HEART TISSUE.

New tissue is formed at the points of adhesion just as when a wound heals, and the new tissue is supplied with blood vessels which build themselves as new branches from the plentiful supply of blood vessels in the pericardium. These connect with new branching blood vessels' sent out from those already existing in the heart muscles. . . These two new systems, joined through new capillaries, permit blood from the pericardium to cross into the heart, giving an adequate supply when the coronary arteries are clogged. Professor Beck reported that in all cases the operation succeeded in providing a new; blood supply for the heart. Eight persons recovered fully. In one case a man who through hardening of the coronary arteries was unable to walk without torture, was after six weeks able to undertake heavy manual labour.