Attacking the heart attack

USNews.com: Robert Jennings: Attacking the heart attack (7/12/04), by Avery Comarow

It's hard to remember that a heart attack was once a death sentence. These days, nearly 4 out of 5 heart attack victims survive. ...

Yet less than 50 years ago, well within many baby boomers' lifetimes, physicians did not realize that the damage of a heart attack could be minimized and even reversed. Indeed, it wasn't until 1960 that a research team at Northwestern University, led by pathologist Robert Jennings, used experiments with several dozen dogs to demonstrate that radical idea. ...

Team members found that the blood-starved tissue could be saved if circulation to the area was restored soon enough.

Timing is everything. And "soon enough" didn't have to mean "immediately." The muscle cells lining the interior of the heart wall would die without fresh blood within about 20 minutes, but Jennings discovered that the cells in the outermost layer of the heart could hang on for as long as six hours. It was an epiphany for Jennings. Cell death, he came to understand, moved like a wave through the layers of heart muscle.

The team's discovery, which the American Heart Association described many years later as a "true paradigm shift in cardiology," was published in a then obscure pathology journal. Even so, word spread fast. ...