Cardiovascular Diseases

Animal research was NOT responsible for the development of coronary bypass surgery... I am witness to this event and the least I can do is speak out.  Animal experimentation inevitably leads to human experimentation.  That is the final verdict, sad as it is.  And the toll mounts on both sides." ---Dr Moneim A. Fadali, for 25 years one of America's leading cardiovascular surgeons

Long before William Harvey (1578-1658), the official discoverer of blood circulation, prestigious anatomists were opposing the logic of the Roman physician Galen about the circulation of blood. Realdus Colombus (1516-1559), Paracelsus (1493-1541) and other anatomists thought that the pulmonary artery was filled with blood and not with air. The Church burnt Serventus at the stake in 1553 because he dissected human cadavers, thus questioning the official theory about blood circulation. At that time Galenic medicine, under the protection of the Catholic Church, had already delayed the understanding of human physiology for almost a millennium. The fact that the blood circulated in one direction with the heart pumping blood was known as early as 2650 B.C. by the Chinese.

The human species is the only animal species that suffers from cardiovascular diseases. Coronary artery disease (CAD), stroke and other vascular failures kill millions of people every year; many preventable deaths result of diets rich in animal fats, poor lifestyle and lack of exercise. Every time those diseases are artificially created in animal models, the understanding of the heart pathologies and the finding of real treatments vanish into thin air. Why? Physiological and anatomical differences render cross-species speculations often unvalid and lead judgement into error. Heart transplantation, angioplasty and bypasses surgery have become successful thanks to clinical studies, trials and errors in patients, and the process has been impaired by the excessive preoccupation with animal studies.

Cardiovasular diseases were observed in clinics or through autopsies by Edward Jenner (1783), Jean Nicholas Corvisart (1880s) and other clinicians. The link between high cholesterol and CAD was established by epidemiological studies. The attempts to create CAD in many animal species have been impossible because animals do not produce atherosclerotic plaques and some researchers timidly admitted this fact. Also, animals metabolize fat differently from human beings, a fact quite evident especially in one of the most studied laboratory animals: rats. The anatomy of blood vessels in animals, such as dogs and monkeys, is also a problem to overcome when trying to model human vascular defects. Both alpha and beta lipoproteins increase in humans but not in animals. Medications tested in animals, that reproduce poorly the symptoms and do not develop the same disease as humans, become either neutral or harmful when tested in people although they may work for some other unrelated diseases.

The application of nitroglycerine to control angina or aspirin as anticoagulant was based on clinical observations only. Other drugs such as acetylcholine and bradykinin tested in animals have diametrically opposite effects in people. Ticlopidine as an anti-stroke agent was associated with serious side effects that could not have been predicted by preclinical studies, of course, not even by increasingly shorter clinical studies. Amrinone caused thrombocytopenia, a lack of blood cells needed for clotting, in people but not in rat, hamster, guinea pigs, dogs and monkeys. Other drugs have been withdrawn or relabelled because they were associated with liver damage or kidney failure. Viagra and other derivatives were initially tested in animals to study their potential effect on angina pectoris or chest pain but later it proved not efficacious in people to treat this ailment. Countless examples such as these show that animal testing is dangerous because it gives a false confidence that the drugs are innocuous and efficacious. Recently, the company Bayer has withdrawn Baycol (a member of the statins like lovastatin found by chance and proven to act on high cholesterol in vitro) because it causes a life-threatening muscle disease. Some of these drugs are associated with severe defects in animals, but not in humans, that delayed their use and benefits in patients.

The action of beta blockers or some antihypertensive drugs, like diuretics, were first observed in patients; some of these drugs can be filtered down to treat animals in veterinary medicine, if they react to the drugs the same as in humans. However, the big money and animal research are primarily directed to human health. Attempts to create stroke in animals are difficult and when it happens artificially, medications fail. In the period 1978-1988, twenty-five drugs were found to treat stroke in animals. The number, which worked in humans, was found to be zero. Clinical observations of the effects of clot-dissolving agents advanced treatments while animal experiments did not. Any in vitro method using human tissue will give a result that has more validity and power than any test on some non-human animal tissue. Health conscious people tend to know what to do in order to avoid cardiovascular diseases, however preventive methods are willfully neglected. There is no magic pill to treat cardiovascular diseases, and taking medicine or undergoing surgery is evidence that prevention has failed. The drug industry is fully aware of this fact and laughs all the way to the bank, with the blessing of the government, through the suffering and despair of Canadians.

Thanks to new technologies, first tested in animals, and later medically refined and perfected during clinical trials, we can explore the heart, operate on it and even replace it. Animal studies did not bring relevant information and delayed good science in the field of cardiovascular diseases. Werner Forssmann's cardiac catheterization in 1924, by inserting a long catheter in the vein of his elbow and pushing it up to the right heart, proved useful to examine the heart and its blood pressure. For some reason, it could not do so in rabbits, causing their death. It dropped the rabbits. It also helped in the development of other techniques such as open-heart surgery, and refinements of anaesthesia. There were extensions of Forssmann's idea based on human anatomy. He was awarded the Nobel Prize with Cornand and Richards in 1957. PET scans allow the evaluation of arteries; defibrillators, angiography and echography are now available and owe nothing to animal research, although they were tested in animals.

In surgery, many animals have been used to test new procedures in heart surgery although good doctors prefer to take advantage of clinical practice and training to make breakthroughs because they are simply the best methods. This is reflected by the wealth of opinion against animal research from renowned surgeons of past and present (e.g. Lawson Tait, Charles Bell, Charles Clay, Frederick Treves, Fergusson, Fadali). Heart by-pass operations, organ transplants operations and aneurysm procedures are performed thanks to a clinical understanding of anastomosis, physiology and immunity in humans. Trials and errors in the clinics were necessary to make the procedure safer independently of the many animal experiments that preceded them.