The fivefold variation in the rates of breast cancer around the world,¹ combined with the observation that the daughters of women who migrate from a country with a low incidence of breast cancer to a country with a high incidence acquire the breast-cancer ...

The improvement over the past two decades in the outcome for children and young adults with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is one of the success stories of pediatric oncology. Nearly three fourths of all children and young adults with this disease who undergo ...

Without antiretroviral therapy, most people with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection will have the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) within a decade. Many clues about the pathogenesis of HIV-1 have come from the study of patients ...

Although allergic reactions to barium sulfate suspensions are estimated to occur at a rate of less than 2 per million,¹,² the frequency has been reported to be increasing.³,⁴ The cause of these reactions is not known,⁵–⁹ but the additives in barium ...

Figure 1. A 54-year-old woman with lung cancer presented with severe abdominal pain and bilious vomiting. She had had a diagnostic barium small-bowel follow-through 10 days earlier for nausea and vomiting. She had undergone a partial left lobectomy in ...

Between 3 percent and 5 percent of persons over the age of 65 years are admitted to a skilled-nursing facility in this country each year.¹,² The lifetime risk of admission to a nursing home for people who are 65 years old is about 45 percent for women and ...

Severe illnesses, trauma, anesthesia, and surgery are accompanied by activation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, as demonstrated by increased serum corticotropin and cortisol concentrations.¹–⁷ This activation is an essential component of the ...

Presentation of Case

A 22-year-old man was admitted to the hospital because of respiratory distress and fever.

The patient was known to have sickle cell disease but had had few problems during childhood except for priapism, which required surgical ...

Chemophobia, the unreasonable fear of chemicals, is a common public reaction to scientific or media reports suggesting that exposure to various environmental contaminants may pose a threat to health. The specter of cancer, birth defects, and irreversible ...

During the first half of this century, surgery and radiation were the only effective treatments for cancer, and cure was possible only in patients with localized disease. The introduction of chemotherapy in the late 1940s has had a disappointingly limited ...

Viruses have caused human diseases throughout history.¹ They have developed remarkable and unique properties to help them survive. In response to the threat from viruses, the immune system has evolved two major pathways of protection, humoral (antibody) ...

Thrombolysis — Not a Panacea for Ischemic Stroke

Thrombolysis with intravenous recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (t-PA) has quickly become part of the emergency care of patients with stroke. In December 1995, the report of a trial sponsored jointly ...

To the Editor: As the complainant in the example involving multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome discussed in “The Messenger under Attack” Sounding Board article by Deyo et al. (April 14 issue),¹ I wish to correct some of the authors' many errors that ...

To the Editor: Hartmann et al. (June 19 issue)¹ apparently assumed that a neutrophil count of zero per cubic millimeter has the same implications as a count of 499 per cubic millimeter, an assumption we all know is not correct. Failing to stratify ...

To the Editor: The conclusion of Pui et al. (June 19 issue)¹ that “whether the benefits of G-CSF [granulocyte colony-stimulating factor] therapy justify its use in individual cases is ultimately a matter of clinical judgment” is surprising. Their study ...

To the Editor: Spaulding and colleagues (June 5 issue)¹ present important information regarding coronary morphology and outcome after angioplasty in survivors of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. They found coronary occlusions in 48 percent of their ...

To the Editor: Treatment of symptomatic neurosyphilis is an increasingly common clinical problem because of its rising incidence, particularly in patients coinfected with the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1).¹ The mainstay of treatment remains ...

Max Brödel's 1896 cartoon, “The Saint,” depicts William Osler atop a tornado, garbed as a heavenly angel (Figure 1). Haloed, small-winged and robed, with baby feet, large head, and familiar drooping moustache and dour countenance, he is part of the ...

The life of Walker Percy follows one of the more unusual and brilliant trajectories to have originated in a conventional medical education. Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916, educated as a physician, and then, just as he was beginning his ...

There are a lot of books about dreams and dreaming. These usually fall into two categories: those written by therapists, who use dreams to aid their understanding of their individual patients, and those written by researchers, who investigate dreams as a ...

Pregnancy Loss in the Antiphospholipid-Antibody Syndrome — A Possible Thrombogenic Mechanism Original Article, N Engl J Med 1997:337;154-160.. On page 156, in lines 1 and 3 of the left-hand column and in the third line from the bottom of the right-hand ...