The widespread use of emergency postcoital contraception could prevent 1.7 million unintended pregnancies and 0.8 million abortions each year in the United States.¹ Emergency contraception has been licensed in the United Kingdom since 1984. Although many ...

Stroke occurs by the age of 20 in about 11 percent of patients with sickle cell anemia.¹–³ The most frequent cause of brain infarction in these patients is blockage of the intracranial internal carotid and middle cerebral arteries.⁴,⁵ These lesions can be ...

Elevated serum levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and reduced levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol are important independent risk factors for coronary heart disease.¹,² Reducing LDL cholesterol levels by means of drug ...

Patients with intermediate- or high-grade non-Hodgkin's lymphoma can be cured with doxorubicin-containing combination chemotherapy.¹ The cure rate varies according to several pretreatment prognostic variables, including the stage of disease.² Chemotherapy ...

Cortisol-secreting adrenal adenomas are an uncommon cause of Cushing's syndrome. Little is known about the events leading to the formation of these tumors, but molecular defects, including activating mutations of receptors for corticotropic factors, have ...

Figure 1. During budding, the nascent capsid of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) associates with the plasma membrane of the host cell and induces the extrusion of the lipid bilayer. To form a fully infectious particle, the capsid and the viral-...

Acute human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection is a transient symptomatic illness associated with high-titer HIV-1 replication and a robust and expansive immunologic response to the invading pathogen. From 40 to 90 percent of new HIV-1 ...

To be effective, postcoital contraception must be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this issue of the Journal, Glasier and Baird present the results of a practical study demonstrating that prescribing emergency contraceptive pills before ...

The history of sickle cell disease shows how tortuous the road can be from the discovery of the mechanism of a disease to improvement in the care of affected patients. A series of extraordinary scientific achievements began in the 1940s: Pauling ...

The search for the optimal treatment for localized intermediate- and high-grade non-Hodgkin's lymphoma has progressed through several phases in recent decades. In the 1960s and early 1970s, irradiation had a prominent, if not exclusive, role. However, ...

To the Editor: In their report of the efficacy and safety of vena caval filters in patients with proximal deep-vein thrombosis, Decousus et al. (Feb. 12 issue)¹ conclude that the initial benefit of vena caval filters for the prevention of pulmonary ...

To the Editor: The article by Cho et al. (Jan. 22 issue)¹ on the transplantation of kidneys from donors whose hearts have stopped beating raises serious ethical questions about this procedure. For those of us who maintain that causing death by removing ...

To the Editor: To substantiate their thesis on the nephrotoxicity of mixed analgesics, De Broe and Elseviers (Feb. 12 issue)¹ claim that in Belgium the decrease in the frequency of analgesic nephropathy began only in 1992, five years after unspecified ...

To the Editor: Newacheck et al. (Feb. 19 issue)¹ conclude that recent legislative efforts to expand health insurance coverage for children may substantially improve access to and use of primary care for children. A previous study analyzing the ...

To the Editor: Iglehart's analysis of government support for graduate medical education (Feb. 5 issue)¹ contains a quotation from Gail Wilensky. The critical question she raises deserves a vigorous response: Why should the government, or for that matter ...

To the Editor: In 1996, several European gastroenterologists recommended that first-line treatment of Helicobacter pylori infection should consist of a proton-pump inhibitor combined with two of the following: clarithromycin, a nitroimidazole (...

This beautifully produced book has two purposes. The first is to answer the question posed by the editor, Irvine Loudon, who is both a medical historian and an artist: “What is medical history, and who are medical historians?” Here are 19 diverse essays ...

There has not been a book of this scope since Garrison's An Introduction to the History of Medicine (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders), the fourth edition of which appeared in 1929. In reviving the single-authored, encyclopedic, universal history, Roy Porter ...

In ancient Greece, the great medical teacher Hippocrates taught his students that medicine may consist of many things, but it is always concerned with the patient, the physician, and the disease. In the past two decades, spurred on, no doubt, by a ...

Age, Body-Mass Index, and Mortality Correspondence, N Engl J Med 1998:338;1158-1159.. On page 1159, the sentence that begins on line 8 of the second paragraph of the authors' reply should have read, “Overweight young adults who survived 12 years of follow-...

Oral Sildenafil in the Treatment of Erectile Dysfunction Original Article, N Engl J Med 1998:338;1397-1404.. On page 1397, the first sentence of the abstract should have read, “Sildenafil is a potent inhibitor of cyclic guanosine monophosphate hydrolysis ...