By Patricia Sullivan
The Washington Post
Basil Rifkind, 73, a physician who was a national leader in the 1980s effort to persuade Americans to lower their cholesterol level and avoid heart disease, died June 22 at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington. He had Parkinson’s disease.
Rifkind was one of the principal figures on a 1984 landmark study that provided the first conclusive evidence that lowering blood cholesterol can prevent heart attacks.
The 10-year study of 3,806 middle-aged men with elevated cholesterol and no history of heart disease showed that those who added a cholesterol-lowering drug to a low-fat diet had 24 percent fewer fatal heart attacks and 19 percent fewer non-fatal heart attacks than the diet-only group.
The importance of this finding confirmed what researchers and physicians long suspected, prompting a major public education project.
“The majority of people don’t know that they are a time bomb,” Rifkind told The Washington Post in 1985. Such pithy quotes made Rifkind, chief of the fat metabolism branch at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health, a favorite source for reporters.
“The greater the cholesterol reduction, the greater the reduction in risk,” he told The New York Times that same year. “If you’re eating a 45 percent fat diet, a 30 percent fat diet is a bit better, 20 percent is better and 15 percent is much better.” When others later criticized the scientific establishment for confusing the public about the connection between fats, cholesterol and heart disease, Rifkind disarmingly agreed. “It’s really difficult for the public. But this is the way scientific research moves along.
It is disquieting and confusing,” he said.
Rifkind was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to immigrants from Lithuania. He received a medical degree from Glasgow University in 1955, graduating first in his class, and was appointed as a fellow to the Royal College of Physicians. He practiced in Scotland before immigrating to the United States to work for the NIH in the late 1960s.
In 1984, he co-chaired the NIH Consensus Conference on Lowering Blood Cholesterol to Prevent Heart Disease, which recognized cholesterol as a cause of heart disease and called for a national education program. He served as an ex officio member of several additional reports, which were instrumental in incorporating lipid management into standard clinical practice.
“In collaboration with his colleagues, he initiated the cholesterol awareness studies to track the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of physicians and the public and organized the laboratory standardization panel that led to further advances in cholesterol education and management,” said the NHLBI director, Elizabeth G.
Nabel, in an e-mail to the institute. “Basil was tireless in his efforts to help foster research in lipid metabolism and to raise cholesterol awareness among health professionals and the public and took great pride in representing the NHLBI in this important endeavor.” Rifkind did a sabbatical at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem and intended to move to Israel permanently, but an illness in the family interrupted his plans. He retired as chief of the NHLBI’s lipid metabolism and atherosclerosis branch in 2000.
Survivors include his wife of 48 years, Margaret Rifkind of Rockville, Md.; three children, Sheva Sanders of Minneapolis, Mark Rifkind of Washington and David Rifkind of Bethesda, Md.; and seven grandchildren.
