Patients with malignant hematologic diseases, various forms of marrow failure, and certain congenital disorders can be successfully treated with transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells from HLA-identical siblings.¹–⁷ However, only 30 percent of ...

Transplantation of bone marrow from an HLA-matched related¹ or unrelated²–⁵ donor is a potentially curative treatment for patients with acute leukemia. Despite the existence of a worldwide registry that includes more than 3 million HLA-typed volunteers, ...

Although asthma is a very common condition with increasing prevalence, its natural history has not been well described.¹ Recent studies of patients with asthma selected from the general population have shown increased mortality in subjects with reduced ...

Systolic compression of the left anterior descending coronary artery is a well-recognized angiographic phenomenon,¹–¹⁶ with a prevalence of 0.5 to 1.6 percent in the general population.²,³ Myocardial bridging with compression of an epicardial coronary ...

Figure 1. A 77-year-old man presented with fever, jaundice, and pain in the right upper quadrant. In the past, he had had a permanent pacemaker implanted and had undergone a right hemicolectomy for adenocarcinoma of the colon and partial resection of the ...

Homicide is the leading cause of infant deaths due to injury, accounting for almost one third of such deaths in 1996.¹ Among children and adolescents, homicides are most likely to occur in the first year of life, with similar or higher rates only during ...

The formation of bile is a vital function, and its impairment by drugs or infectious, autoimmune, metabolic, or genetic disorders results in the syndrome commonly known as cholestasis.¹ The secretion of bile normally depends on the function of a number of ...

Presentation of Case

An 83-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital because of asthma complicated by pneumonia that was unresponsive to antibiotic treatment.

The patient had had asthma since childhood, complicated by seven bouts of pneumonia by the age ...

Bone marrow transplantation was first used successfully exactly 30 years ago, in children with congenital immune deficiencies.¹ The demonstration that bone marrow transplantation was also effective in treating aplastic anemia and malignant hematologic ...

Accounts of parents who kill their infants date to the beginning of recorded history.¹ As recently as the early 1800s in Europe, up to a third of live-born infants were killed or abandoned by their parents.² In industrialized countries today, however, ...

To the Editor: Mr. Kuttner is seriously misinformed when he describes the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York (HIP) as “notorious for poor management” (May 21 issue).¹ HIP is led by chairman and chief executive officer Anthony L. Watson, who is a ...

To the Editor: In the report by Nierenberg et al. (June 4 issue)¹ of a tragic case of fatal dimethylmercury toxicity, the patient's history, supported by laboratory records, revealed exposure to the toxin on only one day, with a small spill of several ...

To the Editor: In the excellent review of infection in organ-transplant recipients by Fishman and Rubin (June 11 issue),¹ we were surprised that human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) and herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8) infections were not addressed. HHV-8 is involved in the ...

To the Editor: Blaum and Omura (June 11 issue)¹ report that they treated a case of cutaneous larva migrans with topical liquid-nitrogen cryotherapy. Apart from cryotherapy, various other therapeutic approaches have been used for this condition, including ...

To the Editor: Merkel-cell carcinoma is a very rare small-cell carcinoma of the skin.¹ Probably derived from Merkel cells, the mechanoreceptors located in the basal layer of the epidermis, these tumors are asymptomatic, solitary, small red-purple ...

To the Editor: Oldach et al. (June 11 issue)¹ try to identify the disease that caused the death of Alexander the Great. They conclude that the diagnosis was “Salmonella typhi enteritis, complicated by bowel perforation and ascending paralysis.”

The ...

The Western ideal of beauty dictates acceptable locations for and amounts of body hair. For women, head and pubic hair are desirable, but obvious hair growth on other areas of the body is not. As many as 35 percent of white women have hair on the chest, ...

Endometriosis is one of the great enigmas in gynecology. Researchers have been studying this disorder for more than a century, and in the past three decades more than 6000 articles on the subject have been published. Recently, the International ...

With the widespread use of effective contraception, monthly menses became common in women during their reproductive years. Previously, pregnancy and lactational amenorrhea had been more frequent, with only occasional ovulatory menses. As a result of this ...

One in six women has chronic pelvic pain, substantially affecting every aspect of millions of women's personal, family, sexual, social, and work lives. Indeed, chronic pelvic pain often becomes so integrated into daily life that its cause cannot be ...

For over a hundred years, interstitial cystitis has remained a multifaceted and enigmatic syndrome characterized by variable motor and sensory dysfunction of the bladder. The diagnosis is usually based on symptoms, a urologic evaluation including ...

The Treatment of Croup with Glucocorticoids Editorial, N Engl J Med 1998:339;553-555.. On page 553, in the right-hand column, the first sentence of the third full paragraph should have read, “A meta-analysis of nine methodologically sound clinical trials ...

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990 to expand the reach of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and make discrimination on the basis of disability unlawful.¹ The wheelchair symbol has become a universal sign of disability, but there are,...