The prevalence of overweight and obesity is increasing among women in the United States, with a recent report estimating that 51 percent of women have a body-mass index (the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) of more than ...

The vascular endothelium serves as an important modulator of vasomotor tone and function by synthesizing and releasing nitric oxide.¹ The coronary vascular response to acetylcholine depends on the integrity of the endothelium and the endothelial nitric ...

Tremor can be an incapacitating symptom that leads to functional impairment. In patients with Parkinson's disease and in those with essential tremor, pharmacologic treatment often does not adequately control tremor. In patients with multiple sclerosis, ...

Persistent pulmonary hypertension is common in neonates with respiratory failure.¹,² It is characterized by pulmonary hypertension and extrapulmonary right-to-left shunting across the foramen ovale and ductus arteriosus. In many cases, the disease ...

Figure 1. A 48-year-old man infected with the human immunodeficiency virus had had recurrent painful ulcers in his mouth and esophagus for several years. Biopsies of the lesions were nondiagnostic. Odynophagia and substernal chest pain responded to ...

Gas embolism, the entry of gas into vascular structures, is a largely iatrogenic clinical problem that can result in serious morbidity and even death.¹ Since gas embolism can result from procedures performed in almost all clinical specialties (Table 1), ...

Age-related macular degeneration, a deterioration of the central portion of the retina, is the chief cause of severe and irreversible loss of vision in developed countries.¹,² There is no effective treatment for most patients with age-related macular ...

Presentation of Case

A 35-year-old man was admitted to the hospital because of a painful abdominal mass and fever.

The patient was a native of West Africa who had traveled to the United States several times during the previous three years. He had been ...

In this issue of the Journal, Lovelady et al.¹ report the results of a 10-week intervention trial in which 40 overweight, lactating women were randomly assigned either to a diet-and-exercise group or to a control group at four weeks post partum. The goal ...

Physicians generally accept the idea that exercise promotes cardiovascular health, a concept that enjoys considerable support from epidemiologic evidence. In both men¹ and women,² there is an inverse relation between the level of physical activity and the ...

The revival and refinement of stereotactic neurosurgery represent the most important therapeutic advance in the treatment of movement disorders in the past 30 years. The majority of patients who undergo surgery have Parkinson's disease, but this approach ...

The right of a patient or surrogate to refuse life-sustaining treatment, including mechanical ventilation, is firmly established in American law and bioethics.¹ Moreover, practice standards now encourage clinicians to administer sedatives and analgesics ...

To the Editor: For the safety and confidentiality of the victim of domestic violence, Eisenstat and Bancroft (Sept. 16 issue)¹ advise that “domestic violence should not be listed as a discharge or billing diagnosis.” We agree that material given to the ...

To the Editor: Ackerman et al. (Oct. 7 issue)¹ describe extensive molecular analyses in a young woman who died suddenly as a result of the long-QT syndrome. They discovered a mutation in a gene encoding a cardiac ion channel that led to the correct ...

To the Editor: In his article on AIDS in the 21st century, Fauci (Sept. 30 issue)¹ correctly points out that the origins and propagation of the AIDS epidemic are intimately linked to the social and demographic conditions favoring an ecologic niche for ...

To the Editor: We believe that racial differences in social and economic factors and in coexisting illness may have confounded the finding, reported by Bach et al. (Oct. 14 issue),¹ that black patients with early-stage non–small-cell lung cancer were ...

To the Editor: Casalino (Oct. 7 issue)¹ provides a voice for physicians who hold the intuitive conviction that tables of specialty-referral rates, formulary compliance, and hospitalization rates represent a subtle but nonetheless unacceptable diversion ...

To the Editor: Scombroid poisoning is a form of ichthyosarcotoxism caused by eating spoiled fish, mainly of the scombroid family (such as tuna and bonito).¹ Inappropriate storage of these fish can lead to the decarboxylation of histidine in the flesh to ...

“Will my congestive heart failure ever go away?” “Just what will the diabetes do to me?” “Does this cancer mean I'm going to die?”

These questions demand answers that will shape how patients relate to their illnesses. Prognosis affects their lifestyle ...

The authors of this interesting and original book describe themselves as “lay caregivers of dying loved ones who have insights of interest to others like ourselves and to policy makers who would help us in our task.” The seven-year study on which the book ...

Neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis have always been a challenge to neurologists and to the scientific community in general. These idiopathic diseases target a particular neural system (the motor system, in the case of ...

A Preliminary Study of Long-Term Treatment with Interferon Gamma-1b and Low-Dose Prednisolone in Patients with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis Original Article, N Engl J Med 1999:341;1264-1269.. On page 1264, in the affiliations paragraph at the bottom of ...

A Comparison of Virtual and Conventional Colonoscopy for the Detection of Colorectal Polyps Original Article, N Engl J Med 1999:341;1496-1503.. On page 1500, the sentence that begins four lines from the bottom of the left-hand column should have read, “...