Trigeminal neuralgia, or tic douloureux, is a syndrome characterized by paroxysmal facial pain. Although many patients have adequate relief of symptoms when treated with carbamazepine or other drugs, some patients require surgical treatment because their ...

Intracoronary stenting is an accepted treatment for vessel closure after percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA).¹–³ Moreover, as compared with balloon angioplasty, elective stent placement reduces the rate of restenosis.⁴,⁵ However, ...

Studies indicate that myocardial infarction and unstable angina result from the formation of a platelet aggregate at the site of a ruptured coronary atherosclerotic plaque.¹–⁷ The formation of such aggregates requires the binding of fibrinogen and von ...

Lung-reduction surgery in patients with diffuse emphysema involves resection of the most severely affected regions of diseased lung tissue. Recent surgical advances have increased interest in this procedure and led to its greater availability.¹–⁴ This ...

Glycolysis is the most important source of energy in red cells and working muscles. Inherited defects of glycolysis can cause hemolytic anemia, neurologic abnormalities, and myopathy with exercise intolerance. The severity of each of these cardinal ...

Figure 1. A 39-year-old woman presented with a seven-year history of renal calculi. A plain abdominal film obtained when she was 38 (Panel A) showed enlarged kidneys bilaterally with nephrocalcinosis in a papillary distribution and radiopaque calculi in ...

The enteric nervous system is a collection of neurons in the gastrointestinal tract¹ that constitutes the “brain of the gut” and can function independently of the central nervous system.² This system controls the motility,³,⁴ exocrine and endocrine ...

Presentation of Case

A 51-year-old man was admitted to the hospital because of the adult respiratory distress syndrome.

One week before admission, he began to have a dry cough, with myalgia and arthralgia. Three days later, he had shaking chills and ...

Trigeminal neuralgia, or tic douloureux, is a severely painful condition of unknown cause that typically arises in otherwise healthy people in late middle age. The diagnosis can be made with confidence on purely clinical grounds because the symptoms are ...

Over a century ago, the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow presented a hypothesis that three factors — vessel injury, altered blood flow, and changes in blood coagulability — were responsible for vascular thrombosis. This concept, now immortalized as “...

Emphysema can cause substantial functional impairment and is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Our ability to treat emphysema is severely limited because the principal physiologic deficiency results from the destruction of the ...

After publishing exclusively on paper for the past 184 years, the New England Journal of Medicine has joined many other publications on the Internet. We can be reached at http://www.nejm.org on the World Wide Web. The electronic version contains abstracts ...

A constant feature of health care in the United States is our national willingness to tolerate having large numbers of people without health insurance. This is in stark contrast to the situation in virtually every other developed country, where guaranteed ...

To the Editor: As a regional medical consultant half a day per week for a large insurance company, i advise physicians throughout the country to limit postpartum stays to 24 hours (assuming a normal vaginal delivery and no complications). I agree that ...

To the Editor: The report by McKenzie et al. (Oct. 26 issue)¹ entitled “Hepatic Failure and Lactic Acidosis Due to Fialuridine (FIAU), an Investigational Nucleoside Analogue for Chronic Hepatitis B” is deeply troubling to those who treat chronic viral ...

To the Editor: In their comprehensive and extensive review of the primary prevention of stroke (Nov. 23 issue),¹ Bronner et al. do not mention atrial fibrillation as a risk factor for ischemic stroke. Data from the Framingham Study² indicate that ...

To the Editor: Dr. Woodward's discussion of the effects of computer-based patient records on medical confidentiality (Nov. 23 issue)¹ emphasized the dangers of criminal behavior and the potential misuse of health data. However, when a patient's medical ...

To the Editor: Most studies of sexual behavior include few subjects older than 80 years of age and are conducted in highly selected samples. Our knowledge of sexual behavior in this older age group is therefore limited, but a stereotype prevails that ...

The practice of observing therapeutic confidentiality is so riddled with exceptions that it has all but disappeared. This book lucidly describes the disappearance of privacy, showing how the clinical effect of this loss has been destructive and how mental ...

This book is formidable. Expecting to review a brief narrative providing an overview of the history of psychiatry, I found myself immersed in a work of great complexity. The immersion was worthwhile; this wonderful book will be read with pleasure by ...

Schizophrenia is widely regarded as the most disabling psychiatric disorder, but scientific knowledge about its pathogenesis and treatment has been acquired relatively recently. In the 1950s, half a century after Kraepelin and Bleuler defined the ...

Depression is a common, often debilitating illness that remains underdiagnosed and undertreated. Despite the belief that patients with acute major depression recover completely, 15 to 20 percent of patients have chronic forms of the disorder. In addition, ...

A Comparison of Three Interferon Alfa-2b Regimens for the Long-Term Treatment of Chronic Non-A, Non-B Hepatitis Original Article, N Engl J Med 1995:332;1457-1463.. On page 1461, the numbers in the legend for Figure 1 were calculated incorrectly. The ...