Many cases of sudden death are caused by sustained ventricular tachyarrhythmias. Implantable cardioverter–defibrillators accurately detect and effectively terminate ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation in laboratory and clinical settings.¹,^...

Survivors of ventricular fibrillation or symptomatic, sustained ventricular tachycardia have a high risk of recurrence of arrhythmia, which is often fatal.¹,² Commonly prescribed treatments for the prevention of fatal recurrences are the implantable ...

The endothelial cell participates in numerous functions of vascular physiology.¹–⁵ Many factors, such as cytokines, can alter the surface of the endothelial cell and thereby modulate the role of the endothelium in coagulation, inflammation, vaso-...

Gestational diabetes mellitus is defined as glucose intolerance first recognized during pregnancy.³ It is usually diagnosed on the basis of an oral glucose-tolerance test, with plasma glucose values measured while fasting and hourly for three hours after ...

Hypogonadotropic hypogonadism is often associated with anosmia in a condition known as Kallmann's syndrome. The gene for the X-linked form of Kallmann's syndrome has been mapped to chromosome Xp22.3,¹ and several mutations have been described.²–⁴ In ...

Figure 1. A 69-year-old woman was treated for aplastic anemia with a high dose of androgens (2 mg of methenolone acetate per kilogram of body weight) for nearly two years, with an initially good response. Two months before her death immunosuppressive ...

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system affecting approximately 1 million young adults, mostly women, worldwide.¹ It is characterized by episodic neurologic symptoms that are often followed by fixed neurologic deficits, ...

Presentation of Case

A 59-year-old man was admitted to the clinic because of anorexia, fatigue, weight loss, and a mediastinal mass.

The patient had been well until two years earlier, when his appetite and taste sensation decreased, with an ultimate loss ...

Implantable cardioverter–defibrillators met with much uncertainty when first applied in clinical practice, as zealots and skeptics debated their value. Two points in their favor were clear from the beginning: the technology worked once energy sources and ...

The enduring puzzle of sickle cell anemia is how a single deviant base in DNA, which changes a single amino acid in a single protein within a single type of cell, causes a disease with such variable clinical manifestations. Clearly, additional factors — ...

Gestational diabetes mellitus was originally defined by O'Sullivan and Mahan¹ in a group of 752 unselected pregnant women in Boston as indicated by two or more blood glucose concentrations that were more than 2 SD above the mean after a three-hour oral ...

The scene: The office of the personnel director of a newly established health maintenance organization (HMO), who is interviewing a primary care physician.

HMO: Please come in and have a seat. I've been going over your CV and just have a few questions ...

To the Editor: We applaud Laskin et al. (July 17 issue)¹ for completing a large trial of prednisone and aspirin in women with autoantibodies and unexplained recurrent fetal loss. We believe, however, that several aspects of the study deserve comment.

...

To the Editor: Although the antiphospholipid-antibody syndrome is defined clinically as thrombosis, thrombocytopenia, or pregnancy loss, with the presence of a positive test for antiphospholipid antibodies, the incidence of pregnancy disorders greatly ...

To the Editor: Nygård et al. (July 24 issue)¹ nicely demonstrate an association between elevated plasma homocysteine levels and increased mortality in patients with angiographically confirmed coronary artery disease. It is important to mention that ...

To the Editor: In their otherwise excellent review of fungal sinusitis (July 24 issue),¹ deShazo et al. have made two minor errors. First, in the text and in Table 1, they describe Pseudallescheria boydii as a dematiaceous (pigmented) mold, whereas in ...

To the Editor: Guilhot et al. (July 24 issue)¹ should be complimented for their study of the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia. However, we were impressed by the toxicity of combination therapy with cytarabine and interferon alfa-2b. Their ...

To the Editor: Mark Twain is said to have cabled home from abroad, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” The same could be said of psychoanalysis. In his review of Edward Shorter's book, A History of Psychiatry (July 3 issue),¹ Dr. Pope ...

To the Editor: The ParaSight F antigen-capture assay (dipstick test) (Becton Dickinson Microbiology Systems, Sparks, Md.) is a new diagnostic test for Plasmodium falciparum malaria based on the detection of circulating histidine-rich protein-2 antigen. ...

To the Editor: A 45-year-old German hospital-laboratory technician spent her holiday in Tanzania in March 1994 under malaria prophylaxis with chloroquine and proguanil (chloroguanide). In October 1994 she had fever and headache. A thick blood smear ...

It is Eric J. Cassell's impassioned thesis that the patient — the person, sick or well — has been pushed to the margins of 20th-century medicine by a cardinal and emblematic error, “the belief that medicine involves the application of impersonal facts to ...

Attending physicians who think they enliven rounds with house staff and students by recounting the days of the giants — how things were when they were in training — often find that their bleary-eyed auditors have little interest in ancient history. They ...

There has been a revolution in the understanding of the pathophysiology of vascular disease — the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the western world. Emphasis has shifted from anatomy and physiology toward cellular and molecular mechanisms that ...

The rapid evolution of the pharmacologic treatment of gastrointestinal, hepatic, and pancreatic disorders makes it difficult for practitioners to quickly find comprehensive, up-to-date, well-referenced information on the treatment of all these conditions. ...

All-trans-Retinoic Acid in Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia Original Article, N Engl J Med 1997:337;1021-1028.. On page 1026, in Figure 4, the y-axis label should have read, “Probability of Overall Survival,” not “Probability of Disease-free Survival,” as ...