Then... and now: Celebrating ... Health Article
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Then… and now: Celebrating our 30th birthday, 1975-2005
The Harvard Health Letter celebrates its 30th anniversary in November 2005. For the next few months, we’ll be using this space to look back at the changes in medicine over the past three decades as reflected in our pages.
Our very first issue began with a scary headline: “What You Should Know About Heart Attacks Before You Die From One.”
Some things haven’t changed. Diagnosis of a heart attack still begins with an EKG and a battery of blood tests for proteins released by dying heart muscle.
But in 1975, we deemed the coronary bypass operation “controversial.” Now it’s common, with over 500,000 performed each year in the United States. We heralded coronary angiography, which involves injecting a dye into the coronary arteries to detect narrowings, as revolutionary but were wary, saying it shouldn’t be done routinely. Now an abnormal EKG often leads to a trip to the “cath lab” right away, where angiograms are performed and then, for some, an angioplasty with a drug-coated stent.