The Ochsner Clinic Foundation recently announced that the 29th annual recipient of the prestigious Alton Ochsner Award is Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., Dr.P.H., the first Sir Richard Doll professor and senior academic advisor to the dean in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University. The Alton Ochsner Award is supported by the Ochsner Clinic Foundation and recognizes outstanding scientific achievements that have provided pivotal insights into the fundamental biological and clinical mechanisms that relate tobacco consumption to human disease.

 

Dr. Hennekens seminal work on smoking includes being among the first to discover that for heart disease it is never too late to quit, but for cancer it is never too early. He was also among the first to demonstrate that in women of childbearing age, oral contraceptives pose a relatively small absolute risk of heart attack, but that cigarettes increase the risk about 13-fold. For those who use oral contraceptives and smoke the increased risk is 40-fold.

 

Dr. Ochsner was a mentor of Michael DeBakey, M.D., a world-renowned cardiothoracic surgeon, and together they were among the first to note in the late 1930s that virtually all of their patients with lung cancer smoked cigarettes. In 1950, Sir Richard Doll and Sir Austin Bradford Hill were the first to quantitate the relation of cigarette smoking with lung cancer.