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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 28, 1962)
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FALSE TEETH KLUTCH holds them tighter KMJTCH forms a comfort cushion; holds dental plates tto much firmer and snujfKer that you can eat and talk with greater comfort and security; in many cases almost as well ni with natural teeth. Klulch lessens the constant fear of a dropping, rocking, chafing plate ... If your drug gist doesn't have Klutch, don't want money on substitute, but send us lOf and we will mail you a generous trial box. KlUTCH CO., Box Ilmlra, N.Y. Bunions (let this quick relief. Lift shoe prt-HHiire, soothes and cuah ions the wnaitivetiiiot. Ask for the Bunion sire. FOREST FIRES IV aim wmil "ol- niuii villi l mils iuu. Did you ever wonder about forest fires and why Smokey Dear tries to keep them down? SMOKEY says that every for est lire costs too much. Just putting out last year's fires cost more than $100,000,000. and it came right out of your pocket. What else did you lose? You lost timber, millions of feet of it timber that won't be there when you want to build your new home or put up a summer cabin. You lost birds, animals, and fish, that add so much to your outings. You lost priceless scenery, and recreation areas that arc needed now more than ever. Worst of all, you lost soil and water the lifcblood of our land. Hum oil" the cover of a watershed, and the sure result is soil erosion, and destructive runoff of water, flooding our towns, silling our reservoirs. Water most precious of ail resources wasted through carelessness! Could a "Heart Detective" Doctors in Franiinyham, Mass., seek early detection via series of blood-pressure tests (left), blood samplings, and X rays. "Of the hundreds of articles I've written," says this author, "this was the toughest; yet it had to be done as a warning to other women, other mothers of kids like my own" ON the balmy evening of March 27, my wife and I were vacationing at a beachfront motel in Sarasota, Fla. As Rita sat back reading a novel, she suddenly felt nauseous, rose, and walked unsteadily toward the bath room. At the door, she uttered an almost inaudible moan, then collapsed, unconscious. I sprang to her side and car ried her to a bed. For a moment she revived, put a hand to her chest, and winced as if in pain. I phoned for a doctor. Luckily, Dr. Rudolph Garber lived just a few blocks away. He arrived within five min utes. After feeling Rita's pulse and applying his stetho scope, he summoned an ambulance. "Is it a coronary?" I asked Dr. Garber. He nodded. "Almost no pulse or heartbeat." Rita evidently overheard his remark. "Isn't this silly of me?" she whispered. On the way to the hospital, trailing the ambulance in Dr. Garber's car, he told me: "We're lucky if your wife gets there alive. She has an acute myocardial infarction." (That's a stoppage of one of the large arteries supplying blood to the heart muscle.) For five hours, Dr. Garber and two nurses used every known technique to keep my wife alive. The end came shortly after midnight. I found it impossible to believe. There hadn't been the slightest warning that something was wrong. Rita, at 53, seemingly had been in excellent health. That pleasantly sunny day on the beach, she had been cheerful and vi brant as always, under no strain. Next morning I asked Dr. Garber: "What do you think caused my wife's heart attack?" He shook his head. "We don't know." Since then I've wondered: could Rita's sudden death have been averted somehow? If she had been prone to heart disease, could doctors have detected the "heart attack type" and done something about it? Like most women, Rita had thought of heart trouble as a "man's disease." Such magazine articles as "How to Protect Your Husband's Heart" had inclined her to worry about me, not herself. Presumably other women also are exposing themselves to heart attacks. As a medical writer, spurred by the devastating loss of my wife, I decided to find out what science has learned M Family Weekly, October 23. 1962 thus far about women and heart disease. After talking to leading heart specialists, I went to the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Md., the federal agency that spon sors more than 2,000 heart-research projects throughout the country. These are the harsh facts I uncovered: Up to the age of 50 (or menopause), women suffer from various types of cardiovascular disease but they seem to have a natural protection against dying from them. During her childbearing years, the female sex hormones (estrogens) apparently keep a woman's coronary arteries from hardening or thickening. Menopause is believed to remove this protection. rpnus, while up to the age of 50, men have a five-times JL higher death rate from heart disease than women, the ratio after that is almost even. In recent years, both acute myocardial infarction and angina pectoris have been as common in women as in men. Sudden death, as in my wife's case, occurs in one out of six heart fatalities. For these, and other types of coro nary heart disease which can be helped only partially by treatment, the answer clearly lies in prevention. "It is now possible," says Dr. Jeremiah Stamler, direc tor of Chicago's Heart Disease Control Program, "to find out whether a heart attack is likely to strike and pre vent it. Susceptibility and proneness can be measured." Through the National Heart Institute and the Ameri can Heart Association, the multi faceted nature of heart trouble is being attacked by medical investigators or, as I call them, "heart detectives," from many directions. As part of their Heart Disease Control Program, long-range studies are going on with thousands of people in at least a dozen communities, including Minneapolis, Los An geles, Claxton, Ga., Albany, N. Y., Tecumseh, Mich., and Framingham, Mass. From such research projects, investigators can now point to the main factors that heighten the risk of heart disease. In effect, these may be the characteristic features in the profile of the coronary-prone: 1. High blood pressure (hypertension) affects twice as many women as men in the U.S. Over a period of years, if undiagnosed and untreated, it speeds up the deposit of foreign material in the coronary artery and, in time, can permanently damage the heart by enlarging it to the point where it can't function properly. With hypertension, the Have Saved mm Periodic X rays reveal any heart enlargement. chances of heart disease are increased sixfold among women aged 40-59; among men, the threat is less than half as great. 2. Danger is increased two or three times when, in addition to high blood pressure, an X ray or electro cardiograph shows enlargement of the heart's main pumping chamber, the left ventricle. This can be due to hypertension or to various forms of structural heart disease, medical experts say. 3. Diet, or more precisely the kind of fats you consume, may be an important influence. A number of medical authorities suspect that a high level of cholesterol, a fatty substance in the blood, is "associated" with heart attacks. At Framingham, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, it appeared that people with high cholesterol were about four times more vulnerable to heart disease than those with low blood fat. (Many experts, however, maintain there is no conclusive proof that changing dietary habits of fat consumption will actually reduce the peril of having a heart attack.) 4. Heredity increases susceptibility. If two or more members of your family have had heart disease, the odds are that you will develop it, too. 5. The study in Framingham shows a definite link between overweight and heart disease. Obesity boosts the hazard of myocardial infarction by about 50 percent. 6. The presence of diabetes is four times more common , among women with acute myocardial infarction than among those in the general population. 7. Heavy smokers, according to combined reports from Framingham and Albany, "experience a threefold in crease in incidence of myocardial infarction" as com pared with nonsmokers. (The American Heart Associa tion, however, believes that further rewarch is needed over a long period for definite proof that smoking "causes" coronaries.) Scientific evidence also is lacking on other suspected factors. Does stress or tension bring on heart trouble? Experts aren't sure. Significantly, however, a recent sur vey in San Francisco of 69 hard-driving, aggressive career women in competitive jobs disclosed that they had five to eight times more heart trouble than housewives of the same age. Lack of exercise is being increasingly suggested by medical researchers as an important cause of coronary disease. One recent study showed that people in sedentary occupations had three times as many heart attacks as those who worked at hard labor. I found it revealing, though sometimes mystifying, to My Wife? The author poses with wife Rita in happier days. By THEODORE IRWIN compare my wife's case with this picture of the coronary prone. Rita's father had died of coronary thrombosis, her mother died of a stroke, and a young sister was the victim of rheumatic fever. Rita smoked heavily and frowned on all forms of exer cise. Yet she was not overweight, and if she had high blood pressure, diabetes, or enlargement of the left ven tricle, she was not aware of it. Her cholesterol level had never been measured, although since she was just past menopause, she was particularly vulnerable. Could a "heart detective" or any competent doctor have warded off her fatal attack? Whatever the answer, I'm convinced that most women would be wise to take the simple preventive measures available to them. Obviously, my wife was stuck with her heredity, but she could have accepted it as a hint to control or combat other factors, thus lessening her chances of a premature attack. A medical check-up, which she was always reluc tant to undergo, might have detected hypertension. Then she could have been treated with any one of a variety of effective drugs to lower her blood pressure. With these and other medical tools, people with severe hypertension are living longer, and those with milder forms have fewer heart attacks. If her doctor had found that Rita's blood cholesterol count was too high, she could have reduced it by changing her diet. Members of anticoronary clubs in Chicago and New York have been able to drop their cholesterol levels by 10 to 20 percent. Apparently, as was the case with Rita, many women are not even alerted to the symptoms of heart disease. "Wom en are often neglectful of themselves," Dr. Donald S. Fredrickson, clinical director of the National Heart Insti tute, told me. "They should pay attention, for instance, to a chest pain in cold weather when they take clothes out to the line it could be a sign of angina pectoris. Visual difficulties, dizziness, or a certain characteristic headache may reflect severe hypertension. Unusual shortness of breath, attacks of fainting, or prolonged palpitations (an irregular heartbeat) are other warnings." Sudden death "struck from the blue" brings a chill fear of the unknown to the family of a victim who had been in the prime of life. But we should realize that it is within our power to do something that can prevent or postpone a heart attack. I can't forget my wife's last words: "Isn't this silly of me?" It is my hope, in writing this painful article, that Rita's case can be an object lesson to all women. family Weekly, October 21, 1962 I f It I 1 1 You feel dressier (with Tampax) Clean! Fresh! Unhampered! Nothing can show, no one can know. Wear your most elegant dresses. You're safe with Tampax ! Tampax even prevents odor from forming. Isn't it wonderful to all but do away with differences in days of the month? Isn't it wonderful to be as active as you want? to dance, bowl, ski in complete freedom? And yet when you do dress up, you feel confident, poised, dressier with Tampax. That's one of the joys of internal sanitary protection. Why not try it this very month? TAMPAXSmI
