During the past decade in the United States, approximately 10 percent of teenage girls from 15 to 19 years old became pregnant.¹ Births to mothers in this age group now account for approximately 13 percent of all live births in the United States.² This ...

Clinical trials are testing the hypothesis that fetal nigral grafts are effective in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. In rodents and nonhuman primates, grafts of fetal nigral neurons consistently survive, produce dopamine, form synaptic connections, ...

Five large-scale, randomized clinical trials of antihyperlipidemic drugs¹–⁵ have suggested that most patients continue receiving the agents for long periods of time. Reported rates of discontinuation or dropping out range from approximately 4 percent¹ to ...

Essential thrombocythemia is a myeloproliferative disease with a high incidence of thrombotic complications, especially cerebral, myocardial, and peripheral arterial thromboses; pulmonary embolism and deep-vein thrombosis are less frequent.¹ ...

Figure 1. A baby boy was found to have familial hypercholesterolemia at the age of six months. His parents also had hypercholesterolemia. Seven and a half years later, studies of the activity of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors in proliferating ...

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, and its incidence increases with age.¹ Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, key organizations — including the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society — have recommended regular screening ...

Hypoglycemia is a clinical syndrome with diverse causes in which low levels of plasma glucose eventually lead to neuroglycopenia. This review will be devoted to hypoglycemic disorders that do not result from the treatment of diabetes mellitus.

Glucose ...

Presentation of Case

A 35-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital because of recurrent melena after treatment for a gastric ulcer with positive tests for Helicobacter pylori.

The patient had been well until 21 months earlier, when abdominal pain ...

In the mid-1970s, the United States was told that it had an “epidemic” of teenage pregnancy.¹ Ever since then, despite a general downward trend in the pregnancy rate among sexually experienced girls and women from 15 to 19 years old,² too-early ...

The possibility of implanting tissue in the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease to alleviate motor deficits has been the focus of multiple international research efforts for the past several years and has generated much public interest. The ...

Concern that the terms of some health insurance policies encourage overuse of medical care has led to the argument that an important element of cost containment is cost consciousness on the consumer's part. Comprehensive health care reform in the United ...

To the Editor: The reports by Gordon et al. and Horowitz et al. (Dec. 1 issue)¹,² appropriately question the effectiveness of high-dose penicillin as a treatment for syphilis in persons infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). However, these ...

To the Editor: The findings of Elmore et al. (Dec. 1 issue)¹ attest to the subjectivity and gross nature of mammographic findings. Considering that pathologists struggle with an accurate diagnosis even at more than 100 times the magnification of a ...

To the Editor: Fan and colleagues continue the search for proof of the efficacy of perioperative parenteral nutritional support (Dec. 8 issue).¹ They report that among patients undergoing hepatic resection for hepatocellular carcinoma, those receiving ...

To the Editor: The article by Iglehart (Oct. 27 issue)¹ is well organized, comprehensive, and also provocative. Unfortunately, an important issue not discussed is the problem of physicians' legal exposure when third-party payers impose limitations on ...

To the Editor: Professor Annas's review of the Oregon Death with Dignity Act (Nov. 3 issue)¹ again illustrates the potential for serious gaps between theoretical ethics, the law, and clinical reality. Professor Annas argues that there is no need to ...

To the Editor: It is instructive to see the vivid illustrations in the Images in Clinical Medicine series, especially Wong and Mihm's images of primary syphilis (Dec. 1 issue).¹

The photograph showing the hunterian chancre is superb. Also, Wong and Mihm ...

With the publication of this book, Alfred I. Tauber, a physician and clinical investigator, joins company with today's leading scholars of the history and philosophy of science. His earlier work with Leon Chernyak on Elie Metchnikoff (Metchnikoff and the ...

If there is an unacknowledged tension lurking behind much recent work in bioethics, it is over the place of philosophy and philosophers. Certainly, the origins of contemporary bioethics owe much to philosophy and its subfield of ethics. Whether it was the ...

Searching for Magic Bullets is a primer for consumers and health care professionals on the drug-development enterprise, from the laboratory bench to the medicine cabinet. We learn about the process of discovering new drugs, the development of drugs from ...