History of Our Understanding of the Causes of Congenital Heart Disease.
History of Our Understanding of the Causes of Congenital Heart Disease.
复制标题
DOI:
10.1161/circgenetics.115.001058
复制
发表时间:
2015-06
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Gelb BD
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Gelb BD
Maude Abbott, the renowned pathologist at McGill University, worked primarily in the first decades of the 1900s. Her fascinating history has been well documented8 so will not be revisited extensively. She was encouraged by William Osler as she sought to reorganize the McGill pathological museum. Abbott rediscovered the original Holmes heart, resulting in her 1901 publication about that form of CHD9 and Osler’s subsequent invitation to write a chapter on CHD for his textbook Modern Medicine. 6 Of note, Peacock had also cited Holmes’ report of that heart. 5 Because Abbott knew that, 6 we can assume that she was aware of Peacock’s views on CHD causality. In Abbott’s chapter “Congenital cardiac disease” in Osler’s Modern Medicine, published in 1908, 6 she sought to address a few burning questions about CHD including: what is the cause of the defect? Is it developmental or because of intrauterine disease? Largely rejecting fetal diseases, such as acute endocarditis as causal, Abbott, like Peacock, pointed to arrest of development as the primary cause of CHD. She noted the vastly increased frequency of associated extracardiac anomalies, including neurocognitive issues, among those with CHD. She also observed that familial recurrence of CHD was most often in sibships, leading her to conclude that environmental factors were at play. Abbott specifically mentioned “baneful influences acting on the mother during the early weeks of pregnancy,” among which she included great trouble and fright. Abbott understood that genetics was relevant for CHD. She wrote “Heredity, although not so clear or constant a factor in cardiac defects as some other anomalies (eg, polydactylism), certainly bears some part,” and then she cited families with multigenerational recurrence of CHD and cases of CHD with polydactyly. Like Peacock, Abbott was probably unaware of Mendelian genetics. Mendel’s magnum opus, published in 1866, 7 was lost to the scientific community until 1900 and then took time to penetrate medical thinking. Thus,