More than half of all acute myocardial infarctions in the United States each year are classified as non–Q-wave myocardial infarctions, and this proportion is rising.¹–³ Nevertheless, the clinical course and prognosis of this type of myocardial infarction ...

The risk of venous thrombosis of the lower extremities is increased by factors that cause hypercoagulability or venous stasis, such as the use of oral contraceptives, pregnancy or the postpartum state, surgery, trauma, and prolonged immobilization. The ...

Cure of locally advanced squamous-cell carcinoma of the head and neck is uncommon whether a single treatment, including high-dose external-beam irradiation, or a combination of treatments is used. The rate of relapse-free survival is approximately 25 ...

We also studied whether the use of safety baseballs, which are softer than standard ones, would reduce the risk of arrhythmia. A total of 48 additional animals sustained up to three impacts during the T-wave window of vulnerability to ventricular ...

Figure 1. Ventricular fibrillation in an 83-year-old man after coronary angiography was caused by the “R-on-T” phenomenon, due to a sensing failure on the part of a temporary pacemaker with ventricular pacing, ventricular sensing, and an inhibition ...

Organ transplantation is now common. For patients with end-stage cardiac, hepatic, or pulmonary failure, it can be lifesaving.¹ For patients with diabetes mellitus, pancreatic transplantation offers the chance of a cure and the arrest or reversal of ...

Trauma is the most common cause of death in childhood, and inflicted head injury is the most common cause of traumatic death in infancy.¹–³ Beginning with the classic descriptions of Kempe et al.⁴ and Caffey⁵ and with subsequent clinical, biomechanical, ...

Presentation of Case

A 70-year-old man was admitted to the hospital because of polyarthritis.

The patient had been well until 13 days earlier, when he began a 3-day course of treatment with cefixime because of a root-canal operation. Watery diarrhea ...

Over the past two decades, clinical and pathological studies have examined the pathophysiology of the acute coronary syndromes, unstable angina, and non–Q-wave and Q-wave myocardial infarction. In these conditions, rupture of atherosclerotic plaques leads ...

Venous thrombosis is the obstruction of the circulation by clots that have been formed locally in the veins or have been released from a thrombus elsewhere. The usual sites of thrombus formation are the superficial and deep veins of the legs, but it also ...

When he died on a winter evening in 1995, Matthew Messing was only 16 years old. It happened while he was playing in a high-school ice-hockey game in Quincy, Massachusetts. The referee said the boy was hit squarely in the chest by an opponent during a ...

I learned more about comprehensive cancer care when I became a patient in 1996 than I had during a residency in medicine or in practice as an internist and palliative care physician in a teaching hospital. When I was given a diagnosis of aggressive ...

To the Editor: Rao et al. (Jan. 15 issue)¹ found that computed tomography (CT) was very accurate for the diagnosis of appendicitis and that clinical diagnosis was very inaccurate. The clinical diagnoses were inaccurate because they were the surgeon's ...

To the Editor: The article by Ryan et al. (Feb. 5 issue)¹ concerning estimates of the probability of death from burn injuries raises three issues. Assessing the probability of death is useful when mortality is a relevant end point. This is not the case ...

To the Editor: Parolini and coworkers (Jan. 29 issue)¹ describe an eight-year-old girl who had the Wiskott–Aldrich syndrome associated with a nonrandom pattern of inactivation of the maternally derived X chromosome. In the accompanying editorial, Puck ...

To the Editor: The study by Krug et al. (Feb. 5 issue)¹ is unique in having looked for trends in the rates of suicide before and after natural disasters. However, the authors fail to distinguish between the statistically significant increase in the rate ...

To the Editor: Shaywitz (Jan. 29 issue)¹ claims that the “central” problem in developmental dyslexia involves “difficulty developing an awareness that words, both written and spoken, can be broken down into smaller units of sound and that, in fact, the ...

To the Editor: Acute hepatic porphyrias (acute intermittent porphyria, variegate porphyria, and hereditary coproporphyria) are inherited disorders caused by partial enzyme defects in heme biosynthesis.¹ Two retrospective studies and one case–control ...

How do we approach the seemingly intractable problems of our health care system? We clearly cannot afford to continue the old fee-for-service medicine, but now patients and physicians are becoming increasingly unhappy with the competitive, price-driven ...