Reye's syndrome is an acute illness characterized by encephalopathy and fatty degeneration of the liver, and it occurs almost exclusively in children. Although patients with these manifestations had been reported sporadically since 1929,¹ Reye's syndrome ...

Treatment of women with cervical cancer may result in vaginal abnormalities that interfere with sexual function.¹–¹¹ The reported frequency of abnormalities after surgery, radiotherapy, or both varies considerably: 4 to 100 percent of women have a ...

An estimated 310,000 new cases of bladder cancer were diagnosed worldwide in 1996.¹ In the United States, bladder cancer is the fourth leading type of cancer among men, excluding nonmelanoma skin cancer, and women have approximately one fourth the ...

Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease of unknown cause, which is characterized by segmental transmural inflammation and granulomatous lesions of the intestinal mucosa. The disease is complicated by the development of fistulas in ...

Paraneoplastic pemphigus¹ is an autoimmune disease that accompanies an overt or occult neoplasm and causes blisters. It is characterized by the presence of IgG autoantibodies that react against desmosomal and hemidesmosomal plakin proteins,²–⁵ desmosomal ...

Figure 1. A 42-year-old man who had consumed approximately 180 g of alcohol per day for 22 years was admitted to the hospital with acute pancreatitis complicated by a pseudocyst. On the second hospital day, blood was aspirated through an inserted ...

Acute pancreatitis may be clinically mild or severe. Severe acute pancreatitis is usually a result of pancreatic glandular necrosis. The morbidity and mortality associated with acute pancreatitis are substantially higher when necrosis is present, ...

Stage

A 16-year-old black girl presented to the emergency room with increased thirst, frequent urination, fatigue, and an 11-kg weight loss in the preceding two to three weeks.

Response

The triad of polydipsia, polyuria, and polyphagia with weight loss is ...

Today, few young parents in the United States recognize the name Reye's syndrome or react strongly to it. A short time ago the response was far different. In the 1970s and 1980s, Reye's syndrome was feared by parents in a way that was reminiscent of the ...

Strategies to prevent the most prevalent cancers in the West are remarkably straightforward in principle. To prevent lung cancer, quit smoking; to prevent breast cancer, maintain your ideal body weight and exercise; and to prevent skin cancer, stay out of ...

Patients with mental illness are much better off now than they were only a few decades ago. Diagnostic methods are more reliable, and treatments are more effective. Only a minority of psychiatric patients require long-term hospitalization, and the ...

For research with human subjects, the more things change, the more they remain the same. In the 50-odd years since the 10 principles of the Nuremberg Code were set forth by the U.S. judges who convicted the Nazi concentration-camp physicians of crimes ...

To the Editor: Cassileth et al. (Dec. 3 issue)¹ report the results of a large study comparing chemotherapy with autologous or allogeneic bone marrow transplantation in the management of acute myeloid leukemia in first remission. Their study showed that ...

To the Editor: Medical castration with long-acting gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists is an effective therapy for men with metastatic prostate cancer.¹,² Initially, these agonists had to be given daily, but depot preparations that can be ...

To the Editor: The conclusions reached by Wiebers et al. (Dec. 10 issue)¹ about the natural history of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage arouse concern because of the inhomogeneous grouping of patients and the differences in the rates of subarachnoid ...

To the Editor: Dr. Stockinger's contribution to Images in Clinical Medicine (Dec. 10 issue)¹ shows the fatal periangiographic rupture of an aneurysm of the posterior inferior cerebellar artery in a 35-year-old woman. Forceful injection of contrast medium ...

To the Editor: Recreational use of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, or “ecstasy”), a hallucinogen, has increased both in Europe and the United States.¹ This substance is manufactured in illicit laboratories from a variety of organic ketone ...

To the Editor: In his review of carvedilol, Frishman (Dec. 10 issue)¹ did not adequately distinguish the effects of the drug in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy from those in patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy. Bristow et al.² have shown that ...

To the Editor: Transient focal neurologic conditions at high altitude without cerebral edema are uncommon but alarming. We describe two cases of isolated, transient global amnesia at very high altitude.

The first patient, a healthy 21-year-old man with ...

Readers of these pages have seen sections of Some Choice before, since earlier versions of many of the book's chapters have appeared as Legal Issues in Medicine articles in the Journal. Nonetheless, George Annas has made an important contribution by ...

The field of bioethics has grown enormously over the past few decades. Consequently, people entering the field may try to acquire knowledge about it as rapidly as possible by learning only about current consensus and controversies. By doing so, however, ...

There is an increasing need for discussion of the ethical issues faced specifically by surgeons in their practice and research. Surgical Ethics is one of the first books devoted to this topic, and it is a worthwhile beginning.

The 19 chapters were written ...