Erectile dysfunction affects up to 30 million men in the United States¹ and may be particularly common in patients with heart disease, because of the presence of overlapping risk factors, including older age, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and ...

Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the gastrointestinal tract. Since the cause of the disease is unknown,¹–⁴ nonspecific antiinflammatory agents such as corticosteroids are frequently prescribed.⁵–⁷ However, the long-term use of ...

Crohn's disease is a debilitating multisystem disorder whose cause is uncertain. It is characterized by inflammation of the bowel, which usually begins during adolescence or early adulthood and often leads to catabolism.¹ To reduce the inflammation and ...

Hemoglobin solutions have several potential advantages as substitutes for erythrocytes for transfusion. Hemoglobin solutions have a prolonged shelf life, are associated with a lower risk of transfusion reactions, and provide faster uptake of oxygen.¹ ...

Figure 1. An eight-year-old girl had a four-month history of painful mouth lesions, resulting in decreased oral intake and weight loss, and a one-year history of intermittent abdominal pain and irregular bowel movements. On examination, she had cheilitis, ...

The news media are an important source of information about health and medical therapies,¹ and there is widespread interest in the quality of reporting.²–¹⁰ Previous studies have identified inaccurate coverage of published scientific papers,¹¹,¹² ...

The scope of pediatric surgery is broad, encompassing the care of patients from before birth through the adolescent years and addressing a wide range of conditions, including congenital malformations, cancer, trauma, and disorders requiring ...

Stage

A 27-year-old man was hospitalized in late September 1998 with a three-day history of low-grade fever and malaise accompanied by a nonproductive cough, without dyspnea, chills, dysuria, or diarrhea. He also had a pruritic rash covering the gluteal ...

Health care reform is once more at the top of the political agenda, after some six years of neglect in the wake of the failure of the Clinton plan. During those six years, the issue was generally considered one of the third rails of American politics — ...

Crohn's disease is an idiopathic, immunologically mediated disorder in which medically or surgically induced remissions are followed by relapses. The goals of treatment are to induce and then maintain remission through the long-term use of nontoxic ...

Blood is still the best thing possible to have in our veins, according to Woody Allen, and that is certainly the case when the blood is our own. We are not so confident, however, about other people's blood, the transfusion of which can cause unexpected, ...

The public appetite for health information seems insatiable, as evidenced by the daily appearance in the news media of stories touting new medical breakthroughs, the proliferation of health-related Web sites, and the growth of direct-to-consumer ...

To the Editor: Jones et al. (Jan. 13 issue)¹ describe a Tennessee high school whose students and teachers fell victim to a mass psychogenic illness. One should not assume that mass psychogenic illness was the cause, however, given the finding that “floor-...

To the Editor: Despite a thorough analytic effort, the work by van den Hoogen et al. (Jan. 6 issue)¹ appears methodologically flawed. As the authors state in the Methods section, blood pressure and hypertension were examined in relation to mortality from ...

To the Editor: Yeghiazarians and colleagues (Jan. 13 issue)¹ did not mention 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl–coenzyme A reductase inhibitors (statins) in their interesting review of unstable angina pectoris. Evidence from a secondary-prevention study — the ...

To the Editor: It is not uncommon for a patient's occupational history to provide an essential clue leading to the correct diagnosis. Insights into the causes of a patient's persistent fever might be informed by knowledge of the patient's lifestyle or ...

To the Editor: Sildenafil is a potent inhibitor of guanosine 3',5'-cyclic monophosphate (cGMP)–specific phosphodiesterase.¹,² It is being used increasingly by male kidney-transplant recipients for erectile dysfunction,³,⁴ but its effects on the grafted ...

To the Editor: Mild, transient visual changes such as increased sensitivity to light and color-tinge alterations occur in 3 percent of men who take sildenafil.¹–³ We therefore assessed whether sildenafil could alter ocular perfusion.

We studied the right-...

“Stop smoking, eat more fiber and less fat, and get more exercise” — this is the physician's mantra of the millennium. What kind of exercise? How often? What's a good sport or exercise for me? A litany of questions comes from an increasingly sophisticated ...

Research in biochemistry and molecular biology is proceeding at a furious pace. Thousands of scientists, in both academia and industry, are working in this area. The literature has become unmanageable; the Journal of Biological Chemistry, once a modest-...

Medical, social, and public health advances have dramatically increased the average age of the human population in many parts of the world. One consequence of these advances is the increasing proportion of elderly persons in Western societies. Not only ...

Osteoporosis causes 1.5 million fractures and costs more than $14 billion annually in the United States alone; with these rates still increasing, it is a worthy subject for discussion. This book is part of a series intended to update endocrinologists ...