A woman's risk of having a fetus or infant with a neural-tube defect can be reduced by the consumption of a multivitamin containing folic acid during the periconceptional period — before and during the first 28 days after conception. Neural-tube formation ...

Young children rarely transmit tuberculosis.¹,² In five recently published reports of school-based outbreaks, all source patients were adults or adolescents.³–⁷ Tuberculosis in young children is rarely infectious, because young children are less likely ...

Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. A total of approximately 129,000 new cases of carcinoma of the colon will be diagnosed in 1999, and 56,600 patients will die of the disease.¹ Screening and ...

Transplanted organs, particularly livers and kidneys, carry passenger lymphocytes that can transmit autoimmune diseases¹ or initiate alloimmune disorders² in the recipient. We recently treated three unrelated patients who each received an organ (two ...

Figure 1. A 42-year-old man with a history of mild, intermittent pain on the lower left side of the abdomen presented with an episode of painless hematochezia. The physical examination was normal, and his hematocrit was 44 percent. Diverticulosis of the ...

Each year spina bifida and anencephaly, the two most common forms of neural-tube defects, occur in 1 in 1000 pregnancies in the United States¹ and an estimated 300,000 or more newborns worldwide.² Although these severe conditions have been recognized ...

The origin of human lymphomas has been studied by various approaches, including histology and immunophenotyping. In some types of lymphoma these studies suggested the cellular origin, but in many instances the origin could not be identified. When somatic ...

Presentation of Case

A 37-year-old woman was referred to the gastrointestinal unit because of abnormal results of liver-function tests.

Eleven months before referral and one month after an uneventful pregnancy during which she took no medications, the ...

Since 1986, families in the United States have adopted more than 125,000 children from other countries. These children, who have usually been in institutional care before adoption, come from countries with many endemic diseases, including hepatitis B, ...

Three-dimensional computed tomographic (CT) colography, or “virtual colonoscopy,” is a promising new imaging method. The technique combines the use of rapid helical CT with computer software capable of rendering images of the whole colon. Using a ...

The development of effective treatments for stroke has focused on two general strategies. The first, thrombolysis, became available in 1996, when the Food and Drug Administration approved alteplase (tissue plasminogen activator) for administration within ...

To the Editor: Palomaki et al. (April 1 issue)¹ reported recently that 96 women from Maine had pregnancies, with estimated or actual dates of delivery between 1991 and 1996, in which open spina bifida or anencephaly developed in the fetuses. In addition, ...

To the Editor: Chen et al. (July 22 issue)¹ report an increasing prevalence of Streptococcus pneumoniae strains with reduced susceptibility to fluoroquinolones in Canada. We have found similar results in Barcelona, Spain.

Of 2822 pneumococcal isolates ...

To the Editor: The efficacy of antiretroviral-drug therapy in preventing mother-to-infant transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has led to the recommendation of universal testing of pregnant women as early as possible after conception.¹ ...

To the Editor: Phillips et al. (July 8 issue)¹ report an increase in the number of deaths in the United States in the first week of the month, as compared with the last week of the preceding month, with a 14 percent increase in deaths attributable to ...

To the Editor: In their Sounding Board article on remuneration models for research subjects (July 15 issue),¹ Dickert and Grady point out that payment of subjects is a common recruitment strategy, principally in trials sponsored by the pharmaceutical ...

To the Editor: Female circumcision, the surgical modification or removal of the female genitalia, is an ancient custom that continues to be widely practiced, mainly in nonhospital settings. Over 120 million women worldwide have been subjected to female ...

The gliomas are a family of neoplasms that are thought to arise from astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, ependymal cells, or their precursors — the major nonneuronal cellular constituents of the central nervous system. In children and adults, gliomas constitute ...

Elucidation of the structure of DNA by J.D. Watson and Francis Crick was exciting because of its potential to explain the function of this molecule. I find this book, which examines the expansion of oligonucleotide triplet-repeat sequences in patients ...

Hemangiomas and Vascular Malformations of the Head and Neck is an informative book that addresses issues relevant to the diagnosis and management of vascular lesions of the head and neck in infants, children, and adults. This subject has long been an area ...