Deep hypothermia with total circulatory arrest is a method of support for vital organs that is often used during the repair of complex congenital heart abnormalities in infants. The maximal duration of circulatory arrest that will not result in impairment ...

In recognition of the importance of both extending life and increasing the number of years during which people are free of disability, the national health objectives for the year 2000 included as an overarching goal an increase in years of healthy life, ...

Conjunctivitis in the first month of life, known as ophthalmia neonatorum, can cause blindness. In Africa between 1000 and 4000 newborns are blinded by this disease annually.¹ The worldwide potential for blindness from neonatal conjunctivitis is enormous, ...

Restoration and preservation of the immune system are crucial elements in the successful clinical management of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. Current therapy for HIV infection relies primarily on the administration of antiretroviral ...

Arterial dissection occurs when blood enters a vessel wall through an intimal tear and a false lumen of blood is formed within the media.¹,² The artery most commonly affected by dissection is the aorta,¹ followed by the renal³,⁴ and extracranial internal ...

Figure 1. The typical characteristics of relapsing polychondritis are shown in three patients: acute auricular chondritis with marked redness, swelling, warmth, and tenderness of the pinna (Panel A); a deformity of the ear that followed recurrent acute ...

Psoriasis is a chronic, genetically influenced, remitting and relapsing scaly and inflammatory skin disorder that affects 1 to 3 percent of the world's population. The diagnosis is made on clinical grounds, although histologic examination of a skin-biopsy ...

A molecular voyager entering the nucleus of a human cell in search of a gene would be hard pressed to discern its location, buried in the tangle of chromosomal DNA. Only a painstaking examination of the nucleotide sequence along the helical DNA strands ...

Stage

A 27-year-old woman with a history of seizures since childhood was brought to the emergency department because of sharp left anterior pleuritic chest pain, a productive cough, increasingly severe shortness of breath, nausea, and one episode of ...

Much has been written about the rapid aging of the populations of the developed countries of the world. In Japan, people 65 years of age and older now make up 12 percent of the general population and account for a third of all visits to physicians and ...

Ophthalmia neonatorum, also called conjunctivitis of the newborn, refers to any conjunctivitis with discharge that occurs in the first 28 days of life.¹ The infection may be gonococcal (caused by Neisseria gonorrhoeae), in which case it is potentially ...

Patients may be the only consumers who have to seek permission from someone else in order to obtain services. Even those with traditional health insurance require the recommendation of their physicians, as well as the consent of their insurers, to be ...

Managed care changes traditional indemnity insurance and fee-for-service practice by integrating the financing and delivery of medical services, with the aim of controlling costs and improving quality. Both the patient and the physician are managed ...

To the Editor: Puleo et al. (Sept. 1 issue)¹ conclude that the assay of creatine kinase MB (CK-MB) subforms is superior to the conventional glass-bead assay for CK-MB. The routine CK-MB assay used by these authors is not the conventional assay and was ...

To the Editor: We would like to add our observations to Dr. Rossi's interesting discussion of laryngeal tuberculosis in Case 34-1994 (Sept. 15 issue).¹ Many immunocompromised patients have positive tuberculin tests, although a negative result does not ...

To the Editor: The Images in Clinical Medicine entitled “Norwegian Scabies in a Patient with AIDS” (Sept. 22 issue)¹ are superb, but I take issue with the use of the term “Norwegian” scabies. “Crusted” scabies is appropriate,² whereas “Norwegian” is ...

To the Editor: Crusted (Norwegian) scabies is caused by an infestation with Sarcoptes scabiei var. hominis in which the mite population is enormous and may number in the millions. Crusted scabies is more difficult to treat than ordinary scabies and may ...

To the Editor: Chevron and coworkers (Oct. 27 issue)¹ reported the absence of immunostaining for utrophin on the surface of muscle fibers in an unidentified muscle from a boy with a form of muscular dystrophy who died at the age of 15 years. An absence ...

To the Editor: The article by Burrow et al. on maternal and fetal thyroid function (Oct. 20 issue)¹ was enlightening, but the authors did not address the possible effect on fetal thyroid function of antithyroid peroxidase (microsomal) antibodies in women ...

To the Editor: The mainstay of treatment for sideroblastic anemia, a group of heterogeneous disorders¹,² involving a defect in heme synthesis,³ is transfusion. We describe a 19-year-old man with sideroblastic anemia who was successfully treated with ...

To the Editor: We describe a physician who performed cardioversion on himself.

A 40-year-old plastic surgeon received an electric shock from a 110-V wall socket while trying to repair his examining-room lamp. He felt his heart beating very fast, and he ...

The history of medicine is not everyone's cup of tea, or glass of beer. Some physicians show a studied indifference to the profession's past, whether the focus is on triumphs, ineptitude, or unscientific groupings. “What do I have to learn from such ...

Drs. Norden, Gillespie, and Nade have written what may be the definitive treatise on bone and joint infections. They classify bone and joint infections in the same three groups proposed by Waldvogel et al. in their review of osteomyelitis (Osteomyelitis: ...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a paradigm of the opportunistic pathogen. Over the first four decades of the antimicrobial era, this organism transformed itself from an uncommon and unremarkable pathogen to one of the principal agents of nosocomial infections ...

This book, the work of 102 contributing authors, is the result of an ambitious attempt to provide timely and comprehensive information about disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV); it is intended to be relevant to all geographic regions ...

The epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has forced us to acknowledge the limitations of science and medicine in controlling the spread of disease. In the foreword to this book, Jonathan Mann reminds us of the essential link between health and ...