Although most deaths from influenza occur among elderly people, all age groups are affected by this illness. Annual attack rates average 10 to 20 percent and are higher during severe epidemics.¹ Symptoms include the abrupt onset of fever, myalgia, sore ...

Bronchial hyperresponsiveness is a fundamental characteristic of asthma thought to have a heritable component.¹ Longitudinal studies in children show that bronchial hyperresponsiveness precedes asthma and is a risk factor for the development of asthma.²,³ ...

Hodgkin's disease is generally regarded as a distinct type of malignant lymphoma, because Reed–Sternberg cells are present in an admixture of various nonmalignant cells. Immunologic studies of Reed–Sternberg cells from the nodular-sclerosing, mixed-...

The emergence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis has been well documented in both New York City and the rest of the United States.¹–³ Though New York City had the highest rate in a national survey of reported tuberculosis cases in the first quarter of ...

Figure 1. Virions of influenza A virus (arrows) are seen budding from the surface of kidney cells (K) from rhesus monkeys. In the inset, the dense nucleoprotein core of the virus (arrows) can be distinguished from the lighter fringe of individual ...

Disabling back pain is common.¹,² Back pain is one of the most frequent reasons that patients visit primary care physicians and is the second most common reason for time taken off from work.³,⁴ In the United States, estimates of direct medical costs ...

Identified nearly a century ago, hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia, or Rendu–Osler–Weber syndrome, has long been viewed as a rare condition producing minor discomfort for affected persons. However, this disorder is now considered to be more common ...

One of the most startling discoveries in the wake of the cloning of the human β-globin gene nearly 20 years ago was that many patients with thalassemia carried mutations outside the gene's coding sequence. In certain cases the change affected just one ...

Stage

A 47-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital because of fever (temperature, 38°C) during the previous 24 hours, without chills, cough, or dysuria. Forty days before admission, she had received a kidney transplant from a cadaver because of renal ...

Of all the preventive measures available to practitioners today, few are as medically and economically compelling as vaccination against influenza. The disease it prevents is associated with 10,000 to 40,000 excess deaths and more than 150,000 excess ...

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy of Hodgkin's disease are among the major advances in clinical oncology, but these successes have not been matched by progress in identifying the target cell. Further improvements in the treatment of Hodgkin's disease, perhaps ...

To the Editor: Ascherio and coworkers (April 13 issue)¹ reported findings on dietary fish intake and the risk of coronary heart disease and concluded that there was no relation. There was, however, an increased risk of coronary-artery bypass grafting in ...

To the Editor: Green and Wintfeld (May 4 issue)¹ raise valid questions about the severity coding in the New York State Department of Health's Cardiac Surgery Reporting System (CSRS). Some errors in their analysis, however, may cause policy makers to draw ...

To the Editor: The suggestion by Krolewski et al. (May 11 issue)¹ that there is a threshold value for glycosylated hemoglobin above which the risk of microalbuminuria abruptly increases has important implications for the treatment of patients with ...

To the Editor: Britz-Cunningham et al. (May 18 issue)¹ describe missense base substitutions in the connexin43 gene in all six patients with heterotaxia they studied. Heterotaxia is a syndrome of multiple malformations in which the developing embryo fails ...

To the Editor: The review of interactions between the immune system and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis by Chrousos (May 18 issue)¹ contains controversial comments on therapeutic options in sepsis. The suggestion to use β₂-agonists and α₂-...

To the Editor: In the May 4 issue,¹ we reported the presence of Kaposi's sarcoma–associated herpesvirus-like (KSHV) DNA sequences in primary lymphomatous effusions occurring in the pleural, pericardial, and abdominal cavity, usually in the absence of an ...

To the Editor: (S)-1-(3-hydroxy-2-phosphonylmethoxypropyl)cytosine (HPMPC) is an acyclic nucleoside phosphonate analogue with broad-spectrum antiviral activity against DNA viruses, including herpesviruses (herpes simplex virus, varicella–zoster virus, ...

To the Editor: Attention deficit–hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is considered to be the most common neurobehavioral disorder of childhood,¹ but there are no firm estimates of its prevalence. Dramatic increases have been reported in the frequency of the ...

In July 1995, presidential candidate Robert Dole celebrated his 72nd birthday by releasing a detailed nine-page summary of his medical records.¹ His personal physician told the press that despite the serious wounds Dole received during World War II, which ...

Although physicians understand how a patient's definition of self and identity may be bound to the face, in Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy writes about this topic from a unique and sobering perspective. At the age of 9, she underwent a partial ...

Never before has an entire textbook been devoted to the subject of reoperative surgery. Usually the subject is covered in a few paragraphs at the end of a chapter. Yet, as pointed out in the foreword of Reoperative Aesthetic and Reconstructive Plastic ...

This small but weighty account of surgery began with the conviction that led its surgeon-editors, headed by Timothy S. Harrison, to venture into a land where their surgical skills were in short supply. Its message for surgeons rooted in the developed ...

This comprehensive textbook contains 62 chapters written by 80 authors, most of whom are British. There are seven sections. The introduction covers the general care of the neonate, prenatal diagnosis and treatment, and the ethics of not treating infants ...

Three decades ago, the treatment of spinal disorders was something of a backwater, rarely taught in medical school and occupying a secondary place in the training of neurosurgeons, orthopedists, and others. More recently, however, management of spinal ...