8. Cajones de graves activos
10.10 Corrección digital de sala y ecualización
The transformation of aspirin from a simple headache remedy to a powerful heart-attack drug is an example of how even commonly used medicines can spark medical revolutions. In the early 1990s researchers found that taking aspirin may help prevent heart attacks in people who are at risk. In addition, they found that taking small doses of aspirin after having an attack can make recovery easier, and that taking aspirin during a heart attack can help people live through the experience. The truly amazing thing about these discoveries was that they involved the same aspirin tablets people could buy over the counter at drugstores, groceries, or convenience stores.
Until 1990 or so, people thought of aspirin as just an old, reliable antifever and painkiller drug that also, when added to water, helped keep cut flowers fresh a little longer. Aspirin prevented the cut stems from healing over, allowing more water to flow up the stem and keep the flower alive for a few days. In the 1970s researchers discovered that aspirin seemed to do a similar thing in the human body. In addition to reducing pain and fever, they found that aspirin prevents blood cells from clotting, or clumping together. After further research into this phenomenon during the 1970s and 1980s, a few groups of medical researchers started to wonder if this new knowledge could be used to treat heart attack patients.
Heart attacks are seizures of the heart muscle caused when too lit- tle blood reaches the heart. In addition to pumping blood through the
rest of the body, the heart feeds its own cells through two blood vessels called the coronary arteries. Usually, heart attacks are the result of a buildup of fatty tissue on the walls of the coronary arteries, a condition called coronary atherosclerosis, a form of arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. Usually showing up in adults after their mid-40s, coronary atherosclerosis reduces the flow of blood through the arteries to a trickle, starving the heart muscle of oxygen. If the buildup becomes too thick, or if blood cells start to stick to the lining and begin clotting, it can shut off the flow entirely. From then on, a section of the heart starts to die, eventually causing the entire organ to shut down.
For years, only half the people who had a heart attack lived through it, and they were likely to die from a second or a third attack. Even when advanced surgical methods and simple techniques such as cardiopul- monary resuscitation (CPR) came into use, one of every three heart- attack victims still was likely to die before receiving medical care. The aspirin researchers thought that aspirin, with its ability to decrease pain and interfere with clotting, might be able to calm down the heart mus- cle and open up the blockage enough to get at least some blood through to the damaged area. It might even be possible, they thought, to save some of the dying tissue and increase the patient’s chance of surviving.
To test this idea, the researchers set up studies at a number of hos- pitals and medical centers that received large numbers of heart attack patients. Each patient took an aspirin tablet, and the patients who sur- vived their heart attack were told to take a tablet or a half-tablet regu- larly to prevent a second attack. Within a few years, the researchers had collected enough data to show that taking the over-the-counter headache drug right after a heart attack increases a patient’s chance of surviving. Second and third waves of studies confirmed this previously unknown power of the common aspirin tablet. Better yet, other stud- ies showed that taking a tablet or a half tablet every other day or so helped reduce the chance that men or women in some risk groups would suffer a heart attack in the first place.
Of course, the studies also showed there were some complications to this treatment. Aspirin’s clot-dissolving power could cause health problems in someone who was taking blood-thinning medications or was at risk for other conditions such as a stroke—the rupture of a blood vessel in the brain. In addition, aspirin can irritate the lining of the stomach or cause other physiological problems over time. With a physician’s supervision, though, taking aspirin as a preventative meas- ure could be ultimately beneficial, the researchers said. In just a few years, doctors were prescribing aspirin as a means of warding off or recovering from heart attacks as a standard method of treatment.
More recently, researchers have been examining the effect of aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as ibupro- fen, on colon, breast, and prostate cancer. These three forms of cancer began receiving a lot of attention in the 1980s and 1990s, mainly because more people were living long enough for these diseases to appear. Studies examining the lifestyles of people who were likely can- didates for these forms of cancer revealed that men and women who took many over-the-counter painkillers seemed to be shielded from developing one of these tumors. No one at the beginning of the 21st century knew just why these drugs interfered with these forms of can- cer; those answers would have to wait for further studies. But the abil- ity to use these seemingly simple drugs as weapons against great diseases shows how drugs can have effects that go far beyond what their developers intended.