Top Five Medical Breakthroughs

Dec. 28 -- The year 2000 saw amazing and sometimes controversial developments in medicine, including a rough blueprint of the human genome, government approval of an abortion pill and progress in cloning mammals.

Today, ABCNEWS Medical Editor Dr. Timothy Johnson reviewed the year’s progress and said an Alzheimer’s vaccine, a treatment for early multiple sclerosis and an easier way of performing CPR are among five of the most promising breakthroughs in 2000 that could have impact on patient care.

Johnson selected his top five from the Harvard Health Letter’s annual top 10 medical breakthroughs.

“This year, I looked at their list and picked five that I think are particularly significant in terms of changing medical practice as we speak,” Johnson explained on Good Morning America today.

Johnson’s top choices to watch for more advances are:

ACE InhibitorsAngiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors are drugs that have been widely used for years to treat heart failure and high blood pressure. This year, researchers discovered they also benefit people who are at higher risk for heart attacks and strokes, significantly reducing those risks.

Johnson said this discovery is just the first of many in which drugs that have been used to treat one condition for a long time turn out to be beneficial for others. “I think we’re going to see an increased use of these particular drugs now in treating all kinds of people,” Johnson said. “My own instinct is that ACE inhibitors are going to turn out to be the aspirin of this decade.”

Hormone Replacement Therapy

Just as some drugs turn out to have multiple benefits, other treatments turn out to be less effective than they were considered originally. Hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women is one of those, Johnson said.

“We found this year it’s not quite as valuable, didn’t work quite as well as we believed,” Johnson said. A number of studies this year showed that these drugs — a combination of the hormones estrogen and progesterone — increased risk for breast cancer and weren’t as effective in helping prevent heart disease as doctors had hoped.