Nausea and vomiting are among the most distressing side effects of chemotherapy for cancer, but the best way to prevent these symptoms is unclear. In randomized comparative clinical trials, high and repeated doses of corticosteroids have consistently been ...

Blindness afflicts more than 1 million Americans, 1/10 of whom have no conscious perception of light.¹ The eyes of these blind persons are typically assumed to serve only a cosmetic function. However, besides mediating the perception of images, ocular ...

Adults with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) have an increased susceptibility to Kaposi's sarcoma and B-cell lymphomas, especially central nervous system lymphoma.¹–³ Although the incidence of these cancers in children with AIDS has not yet ...

Immunodeficient patients have an increased incidence of neoplasms, whether the immunodeficiency is due to genetic disorders, the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), or immunosuppressive therapy.¹ A lymphoproliferative disorder sometimes ...

Figure 1. Although Enterococcus faecalis was once regarded as nonpathogenic, this opportunistic gram-positive coccus now ranks among the most troublesome hospital pathogens. It has intrinsic resistance to many antibiotics and a remarkable capacity for ...

In this review we evaluate specific therapeutic strategies for the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)¹,² and make recommendations on their use. We begin with a brief overview of the laboratory tests used to evaluate suspected cases of the syndrome,...

Infective endocarditis is always fatal if untreated and continues to cause substantial morbidity and mortality despite modern antimicrobial and surgical treatment.¹–⁵ Therefore, prevention is a priority. In 1909, Lord Thomas Horder wrote that when “...

A fundamental component of the complex instructions for building and maintaining an organism is the regulation of gene expression. The rules governing gene transcription explain why neurons and osteoclasts have completely different forms and functions ...

Stage

A 78-year-old man had retrosternal and left thoracic pressure-like pain that developed gradually over a four-hour period. He had never had similar symptoms before. Shortness of breath and lassitude began shortly before he was hospitalized.

Response

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Despite the perils of predicting the future of our health care system, many people have weighed in on how they expect the delivery of care to evolve. Such predictions are usually based on the conspicuous trend toward industrial-size delivery networks ...

The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eyes are sound, you will have light for your whole body; if the eyes are bad, your whole body will be in darkness.

— Matthew 6:22–23, New English Bible

Vision is the dominant human sense. The processing of photic ...

Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) is a member of the human herpesvirus family and, like other herpesviruses, infects and establishes a persistent infection in the host. Clinically, primary infection with EBV ranges from a mild, self-limited illness in children to ...

Achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, is inherited as an autosomal dominant trait with complete penetrance. With an estimated frequency of between 1 per 15,000 and 1 per 40,000 live births, it is one of the more common mendelian disorders. ...

To the Editor: Rothman and Michels (Aug. 11 issue)¹ object to the practice of giving “individual investigators and . . . institutional review boards the right to determine how much discomfort or temporary disability patients should endure for the purpose ...

To the Editor: Socan and colleagues (Aug. 11 issue)¹ described an 18-year-old man with pneumonia and meningoencephalitis thought to be due to Chlamydia pneumoniae. Their diagnosis was based on serologic findings (high IgG and IgM antibody titers to C. ...

To the Editor: Lambe et al. (July 7 issue)¹ present strong data in support of a transient increase in the risk of breast cancer after giving birth. The authors conclude that the transient increase is more pronounced for women who are older at the time of ...

To the Editor: The recent polemics concerning the study of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) have been followed closely by oncologists, including those outside the United States. If anything, the matter proves that quality-...

To the Editor: Loprinzi and his colleagues (Aug. 11 issue)¹ measured the effect of megestrol on hot flashes by weighting the number of hot flashes according to their severity. A score of 8 could mean that one patient had two very severe episodes a day or ...

To the Editor: The recent study by Hibbs et al. (Aug. 4 issue)¹ addresses the important question of the mortality rate among homeless people in a large U.S. city. Their finding of a mortality rate nearly four times that of the general population may ...

Here is the ninth in an annual series of reports for which we are indebted to Paul I. Terasaki, J.M. Cecka, and their collaborators at the UCLA Tissue Typing Laboratory. It represents, in a sense, an official report of the national network of ...

During the past few years, several excellent and comprehensive textbooks of anesthesiology have been published. However, this one takes a different approach by discussing the practice of anesthesia in a single volume with an emphasis on clinically ...

The medical community does not suffer from a lack of textbooks on thyroid disorders (several of which are bulkier than a large multinodular goiter). Yet Wheeler and Lazarus have given us a book that is unique in concept and role. This concise textbook of ...