Recent reports have called attention to differences in the diagnostic and therapeutic approach of physicians to men and women with known or suspected coronary artery disease¹–⁷. Tobin and colleagues found that only 4 percent of women with an abnormal ...

Although survival rates for very-low-birth-weight infants ( ≤ 1.5 kg) continue to increase,¹ nosocomial infections remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Prolonged hospitalization with exposure to resistant organisms and multiple invasive ...

It is current practice in the United States for physicians to advise pregnant women who are 35 years of age or older about the age-related risk of having a fetus with Down's syndrome. These women are then offered amniocentesis (or chorionic-villus ...

A possible association between body iron status and the risk of coronary heart disease was bolstered by recent findings from a three-year Finnish study relating increased levels of both serum ferritin and dietary iron to an increased risk of myocardial ...

Most patients with homozygous β-thalassemia require red-cell transfusions to survive beyond the first decade of life. Although this intervention clearly prolongs survival,¹ it also results in the accumulation of iron in tissue, which is itself fatal ...

Figure 1. Adenoma of the Sigmoid Colon.

A screening barium enema in a 78-year-old man with a positive test for fecal occult blood showed a flat round mass with a surrounding hump (Panel A, arrows). Panel B is an endoscopic view of the lesion. ...

The heart shares with other organs a susceptibility to immune-mediated injury. However, the unique clinical expressions of myocardial inflammation have only recently received investigative scrutiny. It is now clear that numerous cardiac diseases ...

Carcinoma of the large bowel, which will afflict over 150,000 Americans this year, is second only to lung cancer as a cause of death from cancer¹. Although most patients present with surgically resectable disease, almost half die of the cancer. Radiation ...

Presentation of Case

A 57-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital because of dyspnea, chest pain, and a mass in the right atrium and ventricle.

The patient had been well until three days earlier, when she experienced the onset of dyspnea, which ...

For the past two decades, routine amniocentesis has been recommended only for women who are at least 35 years old,¹ because at that age the risk of miscarriage induced by the test is roughly equal to the risk of trisomy 21, the most prevalent nonfatal ...

In 1981 Sullivan proposed that the lower incidence of coronary heart disease in premenopausal women as compared with men and postmenopausal women is due to higher levels of stored iron in the latter two groups¹. To support this hypothesis, he cited the ...

To the Editor: The title of the article by Jones and Toner, “The Infertile Couple” (Dec. 2 issue),¹ is misleading: the paper focuses almost exclusively on the diagnosis and treatment of female subfertility. The authors imply that nothing can be done to ...

To the Editor: The articles by Mittleman et al. and Willich et al. (Dec. 2 issue)¹,² suggest that exercise can provoke myocardial infarction, particularly in patients who do not exercise regularly. The accompanying editorial discusses this possibility ...

To the Editor: The Journal has published several articles asserting that strict gun-control laws reduce the rates of suicide¹,² and homicide³–⁵. If such laws had a major effect on both suicide and homicide rates, one would expect that these rates would ...

To the Editor: On reading the article by Vowels et al. (Nov. 25 issue)¹ on the use of cord-blood stem cells to correct X-linked lymphoproliferative disease, we were troubled by the authors' cavalier attitude concerning clamping of the umbilical cord of ...

To the Editor: The case of a polyp of the appendix described by Sticca and Palmer in the Images in Clinical Medicine section (Dec. 2 issue)¹ reflects what is terribly wrong with American medicine today. First of all, most would agree that persistently ...

To the Editor: The December 2 issue included two letters that disturbed me. Objecting to the recommendation and implementation of “an extensive . . . course of treatment for a hopelessly ill 87-year-old woman,” Dr. Reich suggested that “you send your ...

To the Editor: Interferon alfa therapy has been recently proposed¹ to treat patients with recurrent hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection following liver transplantation²,³. We report on two patients in whom we believe that interferon alfa therapy (...

To the Editor: Dr. Eisenbud's unrelievedly negative review (Dec. 2 issue)¹ of our book Critical Condition: Human Health and the Environment is inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading. The evaluation centers on a critique of one table in the chapter on ...

To the Editor: Despite recommendations to the contrary, many Americans continue to select a diet that is high in cholesterol and saturated fat. The fixed choices presented to airline travelers may provide a crude but informative measure of dietary ...

This excellent book, aimed at a general audience of clinical and laboratory professionals, contains 12 chapters by 14 young investigators active in the areas about which they write. The chapters are grouped according to classes of cancer-relevant genes ...

This is an excellent book. It is aimed at the clinical oncologist, but since the editor is a surgeon, there is a bias toward surgical treatment. This is no bad thing, because most colorectal cancers are first treated surgically. The book is not only about ...

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is the most common hematologic cancer in the United States. There has been a need for a comprehensive review of the disease, especially in the light of recent advances in the understanding of its pathophysiology and treatment. ...

The amount of information important to the care of patients with hematologic and oncologic disease has expanded to the extent that standard textbooks encompassing these fields need a minimum of two volumes and over 4000 pages to cover the basics. This ...

This is a short, concise book on the prevention of breast cancer. Dr. Fentiman tackles difficult questions thoroughly and provides some very sensible observations. For instance, his handling of the increasingly controversial and public question of the ...

Neoplasms of the Larynx is an exhaustive and major study of benign and malignant tumors affecting the organ of communication. Nearly half the book is an encyclopedic study of the histopathological aspects of laryngeal tumors. The many illustrations and ...

Burgess has written a concise book packed with a great body of knowledge about many aspects of the autopsy. It is one of the few works available to the lay public on this important subject. I share the author's opinion that the autopsy can and does play ...

For almost three decades, the federal government has provided billions of dollars annually to support graduate medical education without regard to the number and balance of generalists and specialists produced by the nation's teaching hospitals. Now, ...