?And the No. 1 reason why Late Night host David Letterman ditched work for a month: quintuple bypass heart surgery!
Letterman is the latest celebrity “poster kid” to bring attention to a disease, and it’s a big one. Cardiovascular disease – CVD – is consistently the leading killer of Americans, ranking No. 1 for every year since 1900 (except 1918 when influenza struck). CVD killed 953,110 people in the U.S. during 1997 (the latest year for which statistics are available). That’s 41.2 percent of all deaths, exceeding the next seven leading causes of death combined.
Some 59.7 million people, or one in five Americans, live with a form of CVD. The annual cost of cardiovascular diseases and stroke is huge, estimated by the American Heart Association to reach $326.6 billion in 2000, including direct costs of care and lost productivity. According to the latest American Heart Association/National Center for Health Statistics, if all major forms of major CVD were eliminated, life expectancy would rise by almost 7 years.
This month, Medical Imaging examines matters of the heart with a special section on Cardiac Imaging. In our cover story, “Imaging Navigates Improvements in Cardiac Surgery” (beginning on page CI-36), you’ll learn about the increasing role of transesophageal echocardiography, traditional echocardiography, C-arms and cardiac MRI in the planning and performance of minimally invasive cardiac surgery.
If you’re keeping score on calcium scoring, turn to page CI-40 for the latest round of debates between proponents of electron beam tomography and ultrafast CT, including what these measurements imply and which patients should be scanned.
Another item not to miss is our interview with Mayo’s James B. Seward, M.D., and Douglas F. Packer, M.D., on the development of the AcuNav intravascular ultrasound transducer. Initial applications promise a key role during cardiac ablation procedures for treating arrhythmias. Future uses could be in heart valve surgery, imaging the liver, bladder and esophagus, as well as 3D imaging.
If you’re planning a trip to the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in mid-March or the American Institute for Ultrasound in Medicine in early April – or you just want to know what new products will debut at these shows – check out our previews on pages CI-44 and CI-50.
Imaging’s role in cardiovascular disease diagnosis and treatment is on the rise. (The market is estimated at $2 billion.) From 1979 to 1997, cardiac caths surged 299 percent, to an estimated 1.19 million inpatient procedures performed. Echo studies are growing steadily at about 6 percent per year, as are nuclear medicine cardiac scans. Newcomer cardiac MRI continues to gain followers.
Despite all this effort, the number of CVD deaths declined by only 2.1 percent from 1987 to 1997. That leaves a lot of room for improvement – and imaging will be there to navigate the progress.
The most important progress you can make is also the most personal. I urge you to take the AHA’s Health Risk Awareness quiz at americanheart.org to determine your own risk of CVD. And if you find yourself on CVD’s Top Ten list of potential victims, please start making the recommended lifestyle changes today.
Mary C. Tierney, Editor
[email protected]
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