The pooling project data of six large-scale studies conducted over 10 years in the USA revealed the shocking truth that among the people who had suffered him treks in the follow-up period, 90 per cent had one or no risk factor atoll. Among those that started with six or more risk factors, only10 per cent had heart attacks in the next ten years. Many other studies including the recent Helsinki study clearly demand the futility of our going after the so-called risk factors onstrately; the extent possible.
It was heartening to note in a recent study published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, which demonstrated the presence of an abnormal gene in people who get heart attacks without having any of the known risk factors (Nature, 1992, 359:641-44).
Such a study does not belittle the role played by environmental factors such as tobacco smoke. Abnormal genes can penetrate and produce a disease only in the company of environmental factors. If an individual inherits the abnormal gene predisposing him to a heart attack, his smoking will advance the time of onset of the disease. If he abstains from smoking, he will probably get a heart attack in his eighth or ninth decade when salient heart attack is the best way to meet one’s maker.
Most modern scientific data seem to corroborate the good old Indian wisdom that a person has to die at the predator-mined time but lead certain codes of conduct in food habits and also in his social behavior. Nature cannot be that foolish as not to know how to keep an organism going in spite of minor changes within or without the organism.
The high-tech medical world seems to have forgotten the foregoing golden rule. Writing about the latest interventional techniques in heart disease victims, the leading British heart journal had this editorial advice to offer (B.H. Jr., October 1992, p. 423): “It seems that the greater the relative gain achieved ban intracoronary intervention, the greater the subsequent loss. This is certainly food for thought for interventional cardiologists, those considering arming themselves with latest devices, and indeed patients (and doctors) with obstructive coronaryarterydisease contemplating their option.” The editorial goes on to suggest “as the search for a solution continues, we pro pose the matching technique as a temporary surrogate for randomisedstudies; and the use of relative gain, relative loss, and net gain index as a unifying quantitative approach to the comparison of all interventions –assessment and even laser surgery. How good the ways of nature!