It saves people who cannot eat Brown-haired, blue-eyed Jason White looks like any sturdy, active,
eight-year-old boy. But Jason is different; he cannot eat a bite of
food. Ever since doctors removed his diseased stomach and part of his
intestines five years ago, he has been fed almost entirely by vein, and
seemed destined to spend his remaining years in hospitals. Now,
outfitted with a newly designed life-giving vest, Jason is living at
home and thriving. The polyester mesh vest, developed by Dr. Stanley Dudrick and his team
at the University of Texas, has two breast pockets that hold plastic
bags filled with Jason's food—a solution of amino acids, water, sugar,
salt, potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphorus, vitamins and trace
elements. A battery-powered miniature pump zippered into another vest
pocket propels the solution through a tube implanted in Jason's skin
midway between his rib cage and navel. The tube runs up his chest to
the base of his neck, where it threads into a vein leading to the
superior vena cava, the large vessel that finally returns blood from
the head and neck to the heart. Only Jason and 18 other patients are so far enjoying the relative
freedom and mobility afforded by Dudrick's new vest. But thousands of
people across the country who cannot digest or absorb their food are
benefiting, though less conveniently from the feeding technique on
which the vest is based: intravenous hyperalimentation. By using this
technique, which involves pumping nutrients directly into the
bloodstream, doctors are able to keep alive patients with shortened
guts, inflamed bowels, and immunological defects that prevent proper
digestion of food. It is also used for burn victims and people
receiving drug or radiation treatment following cancer surgery. Without
intravenous feeding many of these patients would die, not of their
diseases, but because they were unable to eat or absorb enough food to
sustain life; they would literally starve to death. In fact, doctors
estimate that at least 10% of all hospital deaths are attributable to
malnutrition and another 30% are due in part to insufficient
nourishment. As recently as the early 1960s, medicine had little to offer patients
with impaired gastrointestinal tracts besides the standard intravenous
feeding of sugar water. Even if fortified with vitamins and minerals
and supplemented with predigested protein, the sugar solution provides
only 500 to 600 calories a day, and not enough nutrients to meet the
body's needs. Dr. Dudrick came face to face with the nutrition problem
one weekend in 1961 when, as a young surgical intern in Philadelphia,
he helped perform successful operations on three patients only to have
them die from what the chief surgeon diagnosed as malnutrition. Recalls
Dudrick: “He told me, 'Nothing we can do with knives can overcome
that.' “
