Frans J Th Wackers, MD, PhD (Born 1939)
- PDF / 316,680 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 593.972 x 792 pts Page_size
- 15 Downloads / 211 Views
University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA
Received Aug 17, 2020; accepted Aug 17, 2020 doi:10.1007/s12350-020-02351-6
.
In 1976, a cardiology fellow from the Department of Cardiology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Dr. Frans J. Th Wackers, was first author of a lead article published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), describing the diagnostic utility of planar thallium-201 scintigraphy in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI).1 Of 200 AMI patients imaged, 165 (82%) had focal defects. The location of the defects correlated well with the electrocardiographic infarct patterns. The rate of detecting AMI was greater, the earlier patients were imaged. Dr. Wackers also showed that on serial imaging the defects in some patients decreased in size over time. He postulated that this was due to resolution of peri-infarction ischemia. Prior to the NEJM publication, Dr. Wackers had injected the first patient in the world with thallium-201 in late 1974. That patient had experienced an AMI several weeks previously. Frans Wackers was encouraged to pursue the then new field of nuclear cardiology research early in his fellowship by his mentor, the late Professor Hein
Reprint requests: George A. Beller, MD, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA ; [email protected] J Nucl Cardiol 1071-3581/$34.00 Copyright Ó 2020 American Society of Nuclear Cardiology.
Wellens. He learned that the Dutch company, PhilipsNetherlands, was in the process of producing thallium201, a potassium analog, that showed promise for noninvasively assessing regional myocardial perfusion in a canine experimental model. Frans recalled reading a NEJM article authored by Dr. Barry Zaret, who successfully imaged myocardial perfusion non-invasively in patients during treadmill exercise using potassium-43. In order to undertake his study of non-invasively imaging AMI patients using thallium-201, which he was able to obtain from Philips, Dr. Wackers received permission to remove one bed from the Coronary Care Unit to accomodate a new gamma camera. This allowed him to image patients early in their hospital course without moving them to a distant imaging laboratory. Thus, the first major clinical study using a thallium-201 and a gamma camera was launched, as was Wackers’ illustrious academic career. Dr. Frans J Th Wackers was born in 1939 in the southern Netherlands in the province of Limburg, in a small town called Echt. The name Wackers is found as early as 1590 in the town records. Frans’ father was the son of a mayor and was the first in his family to go north to study medicine at the University of Amsterdam. After obtaining his MD degree, he married and returned to his native province to start a family medicine practice. Frans was the second child of their six children born in the next ten years. After the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, his father became involved in the Dutch underground and resistance. After the war, his father was honored by the Dutch
Data Loading...
