CONGESTIVE heart failure is a major and growing public health problem. About 2 million patients have congestive heart failure in the United States, and the number is expected to increase substantially in the next few decades.¹ The one-year mortality ...

CHRONIC heart failure is a syndrome characterized by left ventricular dysfunction, reduced exercise tolerance, impaired quality of life, and markedly shortened life expectancy.¹ In recent years, vasodilator drugs have been widely used to supplement ...

TO date, the use of nicotine chewing gum combined with psychological support during the initial months of quitting smoking is the only treatment that has been shown to increase long-term rates of quitting, as compared with placebo.^{1 , 2} Of six trials that ...

MIGRAINE is a common disorder that can severely affect patients' quality of life and daily function. The patients typically have attacks of unilateral, pulsating, severe or moderately severe headache aggravated by routine physical activity and associated ...

CLUSTER headache is characterized by recurrent, unilateral attacks of headache of great intensity and brief duration, often accompanied by local signs and symptoms of autonomic dysfunction.¹ The attacks occur in series lasting weeks or months, so-called ...

IN recent years there have been numerous advances in our understanding of the increasingly varied range of microorganisms that infect the gastrointestinal tract. These agents range from newly identified bacterial pathogens, such as Helicobacter pylori, ...

Presentation of Case

A 62-year-old man was admitted to the hospital because of two contrast-enhancing cerebral lesions and a right hemiparesis.

There was a history of hypertension and of insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. The patient was in a stable ...

For many years digitalis and diuretic agents have been the cornerstones of pharmacologic treatment for patients with heart failure. A potential therapeutic role for vasodilators was first suggested in 1956, when Eichna and coworkers showed that an ...

About 30 years ago, the hypothesis that serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine) was important to the pathogenesis of migraine caused great excitement. Methysergide had been found to antagonize certain peripheral actions of 5-hydroxytryptamine and had been ...

With this issue of the Journal we begin a new series of commentaries on the legal aspects of medicine, entitled "Legal Issues in Medicine" and written by George J. Annas, J.D., M.P.H., who is Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law and director of the Law,...

To the Editor: According to Denning et al. (March 7 issue),¹ the presence of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) does not appear to alter the accepted risk factors for aspergillosis (neutropenia and cortisone therapy^{2 , 3}) or the course of ...

To the Editor: As a physician who cares primarily for patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), I was recently asked to see an 18-year-old man with a two-month history of polyarthralgia, diarrhea, night sweats, and colicky abdominal ...

To the Editor: Ferrara and Deeg, in their informative review of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) (March 7 issue),¹ discussed pharmacotherapeutic strategies to prevent and treat this disease. The authors, however, failed to mention the growing body of ...

To the Editor: Accelerated graft atherosclerosis characterized by obliterative neointimal proliferation of the coronary arteries is the leading cause of death beyond the first year after cardiac transplantation.¹ The detection of accelerated graft ...

To the Editor: I am disturbed by the leeway taken by Luthy et al.¹ (and allowed them by the accompanying editorial)² in their conclusions focusing on the mode of delivery as the determinant of subsequent motor function in infants with meningomyelocele (...

To the Editor: The possibility that 43 percent of all persons 65 years of age or over will spend some time in a nursing home, as reported by Kemper and Murtaugh (Feb. 28 issue),¹ underscores the dramatic change in the use of nursing homes. Given the ...

To the Editor: Medicare, Medicaid, and the other medical insurers pay large amounts for any medical "scoping" procedure, and they do this with minimal bureaucratic hassle.

General internists and family practitioners spend much of their time in cognitive ...

To the Editor: I found the letter entitled "Higgledy, Piggledy" (Feb. 14 issue)* quite informative in its suggestions for a standardized medical vocabulary. However, I believe the title is in error. Higgledy, piggledy actually refers to the reproductive ...

We have come to accept, as a matter of both law and medical ethics, that open and honest discussion is crucial to the doctor–patient relationship. We accordingly deplore the practice in Plato's Greece whereby, for slaves, "verbal communication between ...

This history of the discovery or invention of effective prototypical drugs and vaccines is clearly based on the unstated premise that they are important links in a chain of steadily improving scientific reasoning and technology forged over the past 160 ...

Between the deaths of Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) and William Osier (1849-1919), widely regarded as the outstanding American physicians at the turn of their respective centuries, American medicine underwent a series of major transformations that are the ...

The dust-jacket blurb extols this book as a fascinating account of the development of pediatrics in various parts of Europe and North America. While it is indeed a potpourri of information about a variety of subjects related to pediatrics, it can hardly ...

This book endeavors to present a comprehensive view of the changing concepts of human reproduction and parenthood as well as of the public perception of new forms of reproductive technology. The book is exceptionally insightful, thoroughly researched, and ...

Can a book written by editors still be a good read? Can a book about ethics without a single ethicist among its authors be useful? The answer is yes to both questions.

Here, members of the Council of Biology Editors have responded anonymously to a survey ...

Two recent books by philosophers address the problem of asserting selective moral control over the expanding scope of medical technology to prevent death.

In the first book, Thomasma and Graber discuss physicians' obligations to ease human suffering, ...

Biomedical Science

Anatomy of the Cortex: Statistics and geometry. By V. Braitenberg and A. Schuz. 249 pp., illustrated. New York, Springer-Verlag, 1991. $39.

Atherosclerosis II: Recent progress in atherosclerosis research. (Annals of the New York Academy ...

Notices submitted for publication should contain a mailing address and phone number of a contact person or department. We regret we are unable to publish all Notices received.

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

The following courses will be offered: "...

Postpartum Thyroid Dysfunction and Depression in an Unselected Population (June 20, 1991; 324:1815-6). In the second paragraph of the letter, the sentence that begins on the 13th line should have read, "Postpartum thyroid dysfunction was defined as ...

These guidelines are in accordance with the "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals." (The complete document appears in the February 9, 1991, issue of the British Medical Journal and the February 7, 1991, issue of the New ...