{"id":24447,"date":"2025-03-21T16:48:12","date_gmt":"2025-03-21T17:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=24447"},"modified":"2025-03-21T18:23:19","modified_gmt":"2025-03-21T18:23:19","slug":"kilmer-mccully-pathologist-scorned-for-new-theory-of-heart-disease-dies-at-91","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=24447","title":{"rendered":"Kilmer McCully, Pathologist Scorned for New Theory of Heart Disease, Dies at 91"},"content":{"rendered":"
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His studies showed that a B vitamin deficiency could cause hardened arteries. It took the medical profession more than a decade to catch up.<\/p>\n

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Kilmer S. McCully, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s and \u201970s whose colleagues banished him to the basement for insisting \u2014 correctly, it turned out \u2014 that homocysteine, an amino acid, was being overlooked as a possible risk factor for heart disease, died on Feb. 21 at his home in Winchester, Mass. He was 91.<\/p>\n

His daughter, Martha McCully, said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer. His death was not widely reported at the time.<\/p>\n

Still a debated idea today, Dr. McCully\u2019s theory \u2014 that inadequate intake of certain B vitamins causes high levels of homocysteine in the blood, hardening the arteries with plaque \u2014 challenged the cholesterol-focused paradigm backed by the pharmaceutical industry.<\/p>\n

Dr. McCully didn\u2019t think cholesterol should be ignored, but he thought it was malpractice to disregard the significance of homocysteine. His bosses at Harvard disagreed. First, they moved his lab below ground; then they told him to leave. He struggled to find work for years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt was very traumatic,\u201d he told<\/a> the New York Times medical reporter Gina Kolata<\/a> in 1995. \u201cPeople don\u2019t believe you. They think you\u2019re crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. McCully, fashioning himself as a microbe hunter akin to Louis Pasteur, stumbled on homocysteine in the late 1960s at a medical conference in Boston. There he learned about homocystinuria<\/a>, a genetic disease in which high amounts of homocysteine are found in the urine of some developmentally disabled children.<\/p>\n

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His studies showed that a B vitamin deficiency could cause hardened arteries. It took the medical profession more than a decade to catch up.Kilmer S. McCully, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s and \u201970s whose colleagues banished him to the basement for insisting \u2014 correctly, it turned out \u2014 that homocysteine, an amino acid, was being overlooked as a possible risk factor for heart disease, died on Feb. 21 at his home in Winchester, Mass. He was 91.His daughter, Martha McCully, said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer. His death was not widely reported at the time.Still a debated idea today, Dr. McCully\u2019s theory \u2014 that inadequate intake of certain B vitamins causes high levels of homocysteine in the blood, hardening the arteries with plaque \u2014 challenged the cholesterol-focused paradigm backed by the pharmaceutical industry.Dr. McCully didn\u2019t think cholesterol should be ignored, but he thought it was malpractice to disregard the significance of homocysteine. His bosses at Harvard disagreed. First, they moved his lab below ground; then they told him to leave. He struggled to find work for years.\u201cIt was very traumatic,\u201d he told the New York Times medical reporter Gina Kolata in 1995. \u201cPeople don\u2019t believe you. They think you\u2019re crazy.\u201dDr. McCully, fashioning himself as a microbe hunter akin to Louis Pasteur, stumbled on homocysteine in the late 1960s at a medical conference in Boston. There he learned about homocystinuria, a genetic disease in which high amounts of homocysteine are found in the urine of some developmentally disabled children.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24449,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24447"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24450,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24447\/revisions\/24450"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}