Medicine: The E in Hearts

Out of Canada last week came news of a startling scientific discovery: a treatment for heart disease (the nation’s No. i killer) which so far has succeeded against all common forms of the ailment.

Like so many research triumphs, this one had been almost an accident. Thirteen years ago a London, Ont. obstetrician named Evan Vere Shute became interested in vitamin E, whose natural sources are in whole grain; he had a hunch that it produced a salutary effect on heart and blood vessels. When a fellow member of his church—his only male patient—complained of tremendous heart pains, Shute put him experimentally on cold, pressed wheat-germ oil. For three months he got relief. When both patient and doctor ran out of funds, the treatment was abandoned.

But Evan Shute did not forget it. Last summer, when a colleague asked him to suggest a research project for a bright young medical student, Floyd Skelton, Shute suggested tests for the effectiveness of vitamin E against hemorrhage. At the University of Western Ontario Skelton set to work on his class-free Saturday afternoons, with a modest grant of $150 and laboratory privileges from his alma mater. He soon discovered that dogs given stiff jolts of vitamin E would not have hemorrhages.

Impressed, Dr. Shute decided to try the experiment on humans, using Skelton’s principle of large, concentrated doses of the vitamin. A friend, Dr. Arthur Berge Francis Vogelsang, had just the man: a 68-year-old pensioner who was dying of hypertensive heart disease and hemorrhages, was due to have his spleen removed the next day. The attending surgeon was willing to try the vitamin, since he was afraid the patient would die on the operating table. Within a week after treatment the old man was out of bed, bustling around the hospital ward and helping nurses with the dinner trays. Dr. Shute’s barber, Roy Bicknell, was in agony from coronary heart disease; three weeks after taking the vitamin, he was able to play the drums in a Little Theater orchestra, go fishing, and return to his work (see cut). Subsequent tests with more than 100 patients brought quick and often dramatic relief.

Muscle Repair. Last week, in two papers read in St. Thomas, Ont. before the St. Thomas and East Elgin Medical Society, Dr. Vogelsang made the first public announcement of the new treatment. With his coauthors, Drs. Evan and Wilfred Shute, he gave full credit to Floyd Skelton for “crowning the research with final success.”

Large, concentrated doses of vitamin E, said Dr. Vogelsang, benefited four types of heart ailment (95% of the total): arteriosclerotic, hypertensive, rheumatic, old & new coronary heart disease. The vitamin helps a failing heart. It eliminates anginal pain. It is nontoxic. But, he warned, it must be taken continuously, like digitalis and insulin, and must not be taken simultaneously with other drugs.

The Canadian doctors believe that vitamin E prevents the destruction of the platelets (small, light grey corpuscles which probably play a role in the clotting of the blood) and increases the blood supply to the individual muscles of the heart, thus effecting muscle repair. Their research indicated that the tremendous increase in heart disease deaths might be due to overrefinement of foods—the polishing of rice, removal of vitamin values from flour, growing of vegetables in greenhouses (thus excluding ultraviolet light), picking of green oranges. All these deprive humans of their ordinary supply of vitamin E.

Said Evan Shute: “There must be failures in any treatment — nothing in medicine can be perfect. But we have not learned of a single failure. The percentage of success is remarkable.”