When it was suggested to a seminar this month that challenges in effective preventive cardiology remain like mountains to be climbed, listeners had only to look out the windows to appreciate the simile.
For, outside the place where they were meeting (itself more than a thousand feet above sea level) stand peaks which confronted the earliest explorers of what now is Vermont.
In this setting, at lodges on a mountain road above Stowe, medical investigators, practitioners, and others interested in preventing heart disease, compared notes.
They heard it emphasized that, while a number of personal and environmental factors combining to produce cardiovascular dysfunction now seem to be identified, and still others are suspected, much data important for cause-and-effect determination and prevention of heart disease remain to be compiled.
This information will have to be carefully developed and clearly spelled out, the dean of the host medical school advised. Robert J.