From irritable heart to mitral valve prolapse--World War I, the British experience and Thomas Lewis

Historical approaches to post-combat disorders

Almost every major war in the last century involving western nations has seen combatants diagnosed with a form of post-combat disorder. Some took a psychological form (exhaustion, combat fatigue, combat stress reaction and post-traumatic stress disorder), while others were characterized by medically unexplained symptoms (soldier's heart, effort syndrome, shell shock, non-ulcer dyspepsia, effects of Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome). Although many of these disorders have common symptoms, the explanations attached to them showed considerable diversity often reflected in the labels themselves. These causal hypotheses ranged from the effects of climate, compressive forces released by shell explosions, side effects of vaccinations, changes in diet, toxic effects of organophosphates, oil-well fires or depleted-uranium munitions. Military history suggests that these disorders, which coexisted in the civilian population, reflected popular health fears and emerged in the gaps left by the advance of medical science. While the current Iraq conflict has yet to produce a syndrome typified by medically unexplained symptoms, it is unlikely that we have seen the last of post-combat disorders as past experience suggests that they have the capacity to catch both military planners and doctors by surprise.

Neurocirculatory asthenia: a reassessment using modern psychosomatic criteria

The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence of mental illness and to evaluate the quality of life of patients with neurocirculatory asthenia. A consecutive series of 80 patients who satisfied the diagnostic criteria developed by Kannel et al. for neurocirculatory asthenia was included in this study. Patients underwent a psychiatric diagnostic research interview and extensive psychometric evaluation, with both observer and self-rated scales for depression, anxiety, phobic symptoms, quality of life and abnormal illness behavior. In 47 patients (59%), a psychiatric diagnosis (mainly an anxiety disorder) antedated the onset of neurocirculatory asthenia, which was thus defined as secondary, also because cardiorespiratory symptoms were part of the mental symptoms. In the remaining 33 patients (41%) neurocirculatory asthenia was the primary disorder. Patients with secondary neurocirculatory asthenia reported significantly higher levels of anxiety, depression, social phobia, abnormal illness behavior and an impaired quality of life compared with patients with primary neurocirculatory asthenia. This latter did not significantly differ in these variables (except for depression) from healthy control subjects matched for sociodemographic variables. At a 1-year follow-up, patients with primary neurocirculatory asthenia had a much better prognosis than those with secondary neurocirculatory asthenia. The results indicate the feasibility of the primary/secondary distinction based on the time of onset of mental and cardiorespiratory symptoms in neurocirculatory asthenia. Since only about one quarter of the patients were found to suffer from decreased energy and fatigue according to specified criteria, the terms neurocirculatory asthenia and effort syndrome should probably be discarded.

Samuel A Levine's first world war encounters with Mackenzie and Lewis

Samuel Albert Levine was a key figure in modern cardiology in the United States. During the first world war he was one of a select group of United States medical officers assigned to the British Military Heart Hospital where he encountered the "British medical giants"--Clifford Allbutt, William Osler, James Mackenzie, and Thomas Lewis. Levine's diary, written when he was a young medical officer during the first world war, presents crisp character sketches of James Mackenzie and Thomas Lewis. The autobiographical vignettes he wrote later in life were more gracious and polished retrospectives. The Levine perspectives, separated by a half century, contribute to our understanding of the developing fabric of Anglo-American cardiology.

Can Patients with Chest Pain and Normal Coronary Arteries Be Discriminated from Those with Coronary Artery Disease Prior to Coronary Angiography?

To determine whether the precatheterization clinical data in patients with chest pain could be used to discriminate patients with normal coronary arteries (NCA) from those with coronary artery disease, the authors compared 125 con secutive patients with < 30% stenosis of all major coronary arteries and 125 patients with > 60% stenosis of one or more major coronary arteries. Clinical characteristics that occurred more frequently in patients with NCA were: non exertional pain, pain to the left of the sternum, sharp pain, associated palpita tions, absence of typical relief with sublingual nitroglycerin, pain commencing less than one week or more than ten years prior to coronary angiography, a normal electrocardiogram, and negative results from a treadmill stress test or from thallium scintigraphy. However, none of these clinical features, either sin gly or in combination, could be used to identify the patients with NCA with certainty.