In the early 1960s, when he was a medical resident in Brooklyn, Dr. Lewis Kuller responded to emergency calls when people died of heart attacks at home.
He noticed that the majority of heart attack deaths happen outside the hospital.
In an interview for a University of Minnesota project on heart attack prevention in 2002, Dr. Kuller said that they often went to the home to find people dead.
He was the chairman of the epidemiology department at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health and studied the risk factors for cardiovascular disease through a wide range of clinical trials.
The immediate past president of the American Heart Association said that Lew was at the leading edge of what they needed to think about next. He was able to understand the humanity of public health.
The doctor died in a Pittsburgh hospital. Steven said his father died of pneumonia and heart failure.
The Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial was led by Dr. Kuller. It focused on reducing the risks of heart disease through aggressive intervention by treating blood pressure and high cholesterol and counseling cigarette smokers.
The men who had received special intervention had a 7 percent lower rate of fatal heart disease than the men who had received medical care from their usual doctors. Those who received special intervention had a lower fatal and non fatal heart disease rate.
The Healthy Women Study showed that menopause was a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
Anne B. Newman is the director of the Center for Aging and Population Health at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.
The emergence of cardiovascular disease in people 65 and older and systolic hypertension among those over 60 was studied by Dr. Kuller.
The study found that people with significant clogging of the arteries, but without any outward symptoms of heart disease, were more likely to die within a few years than people without evidence of the condition.
The New York Times quotes Dr. Kuller as saying that you don't have to apply aggressive treatment to everyone.
One test used high-frequency sound waves to assess potential obstructions in the arteries that feed the brain, while the other measured the difference between blood pressure in the arms and legs. The tests are still being done.
In the brain-focused test, an instrument called a duplex scanner is used to measure the speed of blood flow in the arteries that supply the brain.
Lewis Henry Kuller was born in New York. His parents were a kindergarten teacher and a pharmacy owner.
He received a degree from Hamilton College in 1955. He graduated from George Washington University with a degree in medicine.
He earned a master's degree in public health from the University of Baltimore in 1964 after working as a medical officer in the navy. He was trained in preventive medicine.
Dr. Kuller was a professor of chronic diseases and epidemiology at the University of Maryland. He published many studies about sudden cardiac death. arteriosclerotic heart disease accounted for 58 percent of the deaths in Baltimore between 1964 and 1965, according to a report in the journal Circulation.
Dr. Kuller called for a program of primary prevention of myocardial infarction and sudden death or methods of early diagnosis and treatment to reduce heart disease in another study.
He was appointed chairman of the epidemiology department at the University of Pittsburgh in 1972 and was a frequent investigator in clinical trials.
He was willing to study the literature, not just in the areas he might be working in, but he would send me things every couple of weeks. He had a lot of intellectual energy into his 80s.
A small group of people found a link between calcium deposits in the arteries and dementia in people over the age of 80.
Dr. Kuller told an online publication of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center that there is the potential for a very substantial impact on reducing the majority of dementia.
The Kuller family includes his son, Dr. Kuller, his wife, Alice, his daughters, Gail Enda and Anne, and six grandsons.
An advertisement in 25 newspapers and magazines by the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds said that it had failed to find a link between smoking and heart disease.
According to The Washington Post, Dr. Kuller said that the study didn't test the link between smoking and heart disease because of the long-established scientific issue.
Dr. Kuller told The Post that the Reynolds advertisement was like an ad that said, "We need more time to think about the issue."
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