Fifty years after heart transplant, let’s do more about heart disease

The 50th anniversary of the first successful heart transplant, performed Dec. 3, 1967, by Dr. Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town, South Africa, reminds us of our amazing progress in cardiovascular care.

Today, the majority of people who suffer heart attacks can live through them with rapid care aimed at getting patients to hospitals where their arteries can be mechanically opened. We can also open a heart artery going backward from an arm or leg artery through the aorta to the beating heart, often in an awake patient.

Life-changing developments on the medical therapy side – including medications for reducing cholesterol and managing blood pressure, along with anti-smoking campaigns – have also helped improve cardiovascular health.

But despite all the noted advances and improvements, the steady decline in the morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular diseases has stopped for the first time in many years.

Not only is cardiovascular disease the leading cause of worldwide morbidity and mortality, the latest epidemiologic data demonstrate that the curves have started to go in the wrong direction, especially for women and minorities.

In addition to the actual health problems, we face a new challenge: How do you get the public’s attention in an often fractured and sometimes irrational discourse around health care?

This “Canary in the Coalmine” is a harbinger of an aging population, the outbreak of cardio-metabolic disease driven by more obesity, diabetes and, we would argue, an increasing despondence and depression throughout the world and certainly in many regions of our country.

Compounding this challenge is the difficulty in fighting a condition that is a chronic disease driven by longstanding behaviors on top of underlying genetic risk.

Nonetheless, we believe now is the time we need to articulate the importance of the next cardiovascular quantum leap toward discoveries that would affect all the lives on the planet for generations to come.

These efforts should be aimed at curing atherosclerosis – the underlying process by which fatty deposits block arteries to the heart, brain, kidneys and legs. To date, most of our innovations and discoveries have been aimed at treating this disease, not curing it.

Imagine if we actually could reverse atherosclerosis through medications, anti-inflammatory therapy, genetic engineering or a vaccine? What if we were able to regenerate or rebuild the heart muscle after a heart attack, miniaturize mechanical heart pumps that can be placed in an easier fashion, perfuse the heart outside the body to improve the number of possible donors for transplantation? Or develop edible tasty meats from petri dishes to prevent heart disease and reduce the environmental impact of animal farming?

In some way, all of these are underway and underfunded, yet the ability to improve human longevity and reduce suffering depends on making quantum leaps for heart disease. We believe that cardiovascular disease is at an inflection point, and the urgency to develop cures is underscored by the impact of worldwide mortality trends in the wrong direction.

We should choose to prioritize the cure for atherosclerotic heart disease to improve cardiovascular health and help humankind.

Similar to the call by former Vice President Biden and others for a moon shot to cure cancer in our lifetimes, we need champions, and we need a call to action with focus from many industries and governments so that heart research and innovation can flourish as is it did 50 years ago.

This story was originally published December 14, 2017 at 11:31 AM with the headline "Fifty years after heart transplant, let’s do more about heart disease."