No organ has a more immediate and vital connection to human life than the heart. Although we have learned to recognize the brain as the seat of our emotions, cultural symbols — from Valentine's Day cards to images of the Sacred Heart — persist in connecting the heart with the human passions of ...

... compromise. 15 Pancreatic-Fluid Collections, Pseudocysts, and Necrosis Up to 57 percent of patients who are hospitalized with acute pancreatitis will have fluid collections, with 39 percent having two areas involved and 33 percent having three or more. 32 Fluid collections are initially ill defined, 21 ...

... data collection to audit all study records. Before enrollment, study clinicians confirmed clinical bronchiolitis and determined the duration of symptoms and the RDAI score. Research assistants or clinicians obtained the medical history from parents or guardians on a standardized data-collection form ...

... Hopkins Hospital. Written, informed consent was obtained from all patients. Data Collection Specimens were collected from case patients before therapy and from control patients at enrollment. Oral-mucosal specimens were collected with the use of a saline oral rinse and 5 to 10 strokes of a cytology brush ...

... reported. Clinical Follow-up After randomization, the first-day visit included a gynecologic examination and the taking of a medical history with collection of cervical samples for Papanicolaou testing (ThinPrep, Cytyc) and anogenital swabs (of the labial, vulvar, perineal, perianal, endocervical, and ...

... containing at least 10 6, 10 5, and 10 5.8 median tissue-culture infective doses (TCID 50) to poliovirus types 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Sample Collection Serologic specimens were taken from infants immediately before administration of the first vaccine dose and approximately 4 weeks after the last ...

... misclassification of ventilator-associated pneumonia. 8 9 Bronchoscopy with quantitative culture of bronchoalveolar-lavage fluid or of specimens collected through a protected brush catheter may yield superior diagnostic information. However, in the absence of a reference standard for the diagnosis of ...

Collective bargaining has caught the imagination of physicians across the United States. Although physicians' unions have existed since the 1970s, union members have always constituted an extremely small percentage of practicing physicians. 1 However, physicians are turning to unions to increase their ...

... engage in collective bargaining. This ruling overturned a controversial 1976 decision by the NLRB that blocked the house staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles from organizing a union. 1 After the 1976 ruling, several private hospitals that had previously recognized collective-bargaining ...

To the Editor: Both Dr. Yacht and Dr. Cohen (Feb. 10 issue) 1 2 present excellent arguments for and against collective bargaining by residents, respectively. Dr. Cohen asks residents first to try other means of being heard, not unions. Physicians for Responsible Negotiation, a national labor organization ...

... million units of blood were collected nationwide. Three organizations collect and deliver blood in the United States. All three are not-for-profit organizations, and no blood donors are paid. The American Red Cross operates nationwide under a single federal license. It collects almost half the nation's ...

... seems at least as strange to try to sell a baby's placental blood (also termed umbilical-cord blood) to the newborn's mother by charging her for collecting and storing it. What makes this waste product of childbirth suddenly valuable to both parents and the public? The answer is that placental blood ...

... but at the end of that month, papilledema was seen on funduscopic examination. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain the next day showed collections of subdural fluid over both hemispheres. Later that day he was admitted to this hospital through the emergency department. Vital signs and the results ...

... disputed, 33 a nationwide clinical trial is under way in the Netherlands in which gene-expression profiles for these 70 classifier genes are being collected from all newly identified consenting patients with breast cancer and used as an adjunct to classic clinical staging. This is an important step in ...

... ethics boards or data holders may interpret the laws very conservatively, virtually mandating that informed consent be obtained before any data are collected. 6 13 Ideally, a very high percentage of patients (e.g., more than 95 percent) would be approached and would agree to participate in a clinical registry ...

... certain types of elective surgical procedures 122; in 1992, 1 of every 12 blood units collected in the United States was the result of autologous donation (Table 2). Up to half the autologous blood that is collected is discarded. 123 Reasons for the overcollection of autologous blood include local legislation ...

... of Blood Donors We reviewed the blood-transfusion histories of the organ donor and the transplant recipients and notified the implicated blood-collection agencies. Donations associated with blood components given to the organ donor, other blood components manufactured from these donations (co-components ...

... system is implemented, however, it is frequently customized for the users. This means that even record systems developed by the same vendor could collect the same information in different ways for different institutions. For example, the relationship between an adverse event and a particular therapy ...

... SNPs in IL7RA in two independent case-control collections from Olmsted County, Minnesota, and Belfast, Northern Ireland, neither of which, to our knowledge, has previously been tested for IL7RA ( Table 1). Clinical and demographic data for both collections have been described elsewhere. 5 Analysis of ...

... (Abbott Laboratories) were selected for use in confirmation and follow-up studies. Sample Collection and Laboratory Testing Plasma samples to be screened for West Nile virus RNA were obtained from the collected Plasma-Preparation Tubes (Becton Dickinson) used for routine screening for human immunodeficiency ...