Heart attacks are the most common cause of death. A heart attack is caused by a blood clot blocking the blood flow through the two main arteries, the right and left coronary arteries, each supplying blood to its respective half of the heart muscle.
Many believe that heart attacks are caused mainly from sclerotic plaques blocking the coronary arteries. Therefore measuring the blood flow in the coronary arteries is essential.
For 13 years, I devoted my research measuring coronary blood flow using a radio-cardiogram (RCG), a recording through the skin outside the heart when the blood stream had been marked with a radioisotope.
After years of work a direct relationship was found between the total effort the heart muscle performs supplying the body with blood and the blood the coronary arteries require supplying blood to the heart muscle itself. The measurement of the total amount of blood the heart pumps, the cardiac output (CO), is a considerably simpler to measure than the coronary blood flow. The close relationship could be used to pinpoint a specific time with high risk for heart attack and thereby provide a chance for preventive treatment.
The cardiac output for an individual varies with the sex, age, pulse rate and body size. A normal value has to have narrow ranges or it is impossible to determine what is abnormal. Correcting it only for sex and body size has been standard for normalizing a cardiac output.
I derived two formulas for normal values for CO and correlated these for sex, age, pulse and a measured blood volume. The blood volume by itself related it to body size. To correct the determined CO to a determined blood volume made a lot of sense because an enlarged blood volume could independently affect the work-demand from the heart muscle. The new normal values for CO recognized the true risk for heart attack within a six-month time-specific window with 68% true positive and 7 % false positive results and offered possibilities to treat and prevent a heart attack.
This scientific work was first published privately in book form. It is now, with the original publisher’s permit, for the first time republished in:
“An Untold Medical Story, Coronary Blood Flow, Heart Attack Prediction and Prevention”.
My second publication contains a set of two volumes: “Add Years to Your Life and Life to Your Years Part I and II. Part I has as subtitle Heart Attack Prevention and Treatment. This parthas five specific topics for heart attack prevention but reports also on the efficacy of health education in a large industrial plant and how to follow up on the educational progress. Part II has as subtitle “Family and Work Enhancement” with information about challenges during working life.
A third health educational book: “You Are It: First Aid when Minutes Count” may also be helpful in heart attack prevention and treatment but offers also help in 17 common medical emergencies.