Reports of interference between European cellular telephones and cardiac pacemakers in 1994¹–³ prompted the U.S. government and researchers to examine the potential for wireless (cellular) telephones to interfere with implanted pacemakers. Since that time,...

The accurate identification of abdominal gonads is essential for evaluating children with virilization and nonpalpable gonads. Gonadal biopsies provide definitive diagnoses, but the gonads may be difficult to find, and operative exploration is invasive ...

Aphthous ulceration of the mouth, though painful and annoying, is usually a self-limited problem in immunocompetent persons.¹ In patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, however, aphthous ulcers frequently become progressive, ...

Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura is a disorder in which antiplatelet autoantibodies cause the destruction of platelets, resulting in thrombocytopenia. In children, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura tends to be acute and short-lived, with only ...

Figure 1. A 48-year-old man who was receiving medical treatment for peptic ulcer disease experienced intense epigastric pain, sudden in onset and without emesis, four hours before admission. On examination, he had rigidity of the abdominal muscles in the ...

The debate over health care reform in the United States has stimulated interest in comparing medical care in Canada and the United States, two countries with very different methods of financing health care. In particular, recent studies of acute ...

The most common indications for warfarin therapy are atrial fibrillation, the presence of a mechanical heart valve, and venous thromboembolism.¹,² Treatment with warfarin presents a problem if patients with these indications need surgery, because the ...

Presentation of Case

A 42-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital because of a mass in the pulmonic valve.

The patient had been in stable health until six weeks earlier, when she began to have a dry cough that occasionally produced white sputum, with ...

The earliest cardiac pacemakers did not sense spontaneous beats, and their metronomic “asynchronous” stimuli competed with patients' intrinsic heart rhythms (if any were present). Later, “demand” or “inhibitory” pacemakers could sense spontaneous ...

Half a century has passed since Alfred Jost¹ postulated that male sexual differentiation is mediated by two discrete substances produced by the fetal testis and that, in their absence, sexual differentiation proceeds to the female phenotype. During ...

Interventional cardiology and cardiac surgery have transformed the care of patients with ischemic heart disease in the United States. Between 1980 and 1992, rates of coronary angiography increased by 163 percent (from 154.4 to 405.6 per 100,000 population)...

To the Editor: A key point in Dr. Angell's case for allowing physician-assisted suicide (Jan. 2 issue),¹ a practice many believe is immoral and contrary to a physician's oath, is that it does not differ from withdrawing certain forms of life-sustaining ...

To the Editor: Dr. Saenger's excellent review of Turner's syndrome (Dec. 5 issue)¹ refers to a webbed-neck deformity and abnormal hairline in some patients with this disorder. This deformity may be one of the biggest obstacles these children face in ...

To the Editor: In his review of the management of venous thromboembolism (Dec. 12 issue),¹ Ginsberg failed to mention the role of echocardiography in the diagnosis of this disorder. Despite the importance of ventilation–perfusion lung scanning, it has ...

To the Editor: Various studies have suggested an important role for Helicobacter pylori infection in the pathogenesis of low-grade gastric mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma. These lymphomas may regress after eradication of H. pylori by ...

To the Editor: With regard to the article by Lord et al. on percutaneous radio-frequency neurotomy for chronic cervical zygapophyseal-joint pain (Dec. 5 issue),¹ one of the principles of treatment after musculoskeletal injury is to protect the injured ...

To the Editor: In my opinion, the first of the two images provided by Wortsman in Images in Clinical Medicine (Dec. 12 issue)¹ is really “useful and clinically important.” ² In a 62-year-old woman with hemochromatosis, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) ...

To the Editor: St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center in New York is located in the Greenwich Village–Chelsea section of lower Manhattan, one of the areas with the highest density of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in the United States (...

This book provides a comprehensive overview of most aspects of the immunology of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and AIDS. Of necessity, the literature surveyed in 30 chapters by international experts in the field fails to highlight ...

Paradox in the emerging specialty of AIDS care is that the rapidity and complexity of changes in therapeutics have created the need for textbook-length compendiums of new information, yet the same pace of change risks making any such book less than up to ...

Important events command our attention, and complex issues require careful analysis. In both respects, the AIDS epidemic is a durable subject for investigation. Popular books have considered the social history of the epidemic, and many have addressed the ...

I read Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues while flying across the Pacific to study the 40th consecutive epidemic of a viral hemorrhagic fever. This one has killed tens of thousands of children and hospitalized millions of others. I paged quickly ...

Improved Survival with Preoperative Radiotherapy in Resectable Rectal Cancer Original Article, N Engl J Med 1997:336;980-987.. On page 984, in Figure 2, the panels for Dukes' Stage B and Dukes' Stage C were reversed. The corrected panels appear below.