The number of patients with end-stage renal disease is increasing at the rate of 7 to 8 percent per year in the United States.¹ Renal transplantation is the treatment of choice for most of these patients, but the number of kidneys available for ...

Acute rejection episodes adversely affect short-term survival in recipients of cardiac transplants.¹ Rejection occurs most frequently during the first three months after transplantation, with the incidence decreasing exponentially thereafter.² Repeated or ...

Whipple's disease is a systemic bacterial infection characterized by fever, weight loss, diarrhea, lymphadenopathy, and polyarthritis and, occasionally, by cardiac manifestations such as myocarditis, pericarditis, and endocarditis¹,² or by central nervous ...

Hypoxia is a potent regulator of a variety of biologic processes, including angiogenesis, vascular contractility, and erythropoiesis.¹–⁴ When a coronary artery is partially or totally occluded, metabolic and contractile changes are initiated in the heart ...

Figure 1. Four days after the onset of symptoms of varicella in a 16-month-old girl, violaceous lesions developed on her neck and trunk that became necrotic and had an erythematous base. The lesions gradually became larger, measuring up to 2 cm in ...

Varicella–zoster virus is an exclusively human herpesvirus that causes chickenpox (varicella), becomes latent in cranial-nerve and dorsal-root ganglia, and frequently reactivates decades later to produce shingles (zoster) and postherpetic neuralgia. In ...

The concept of drug-induced immunosuppression arose in the late 1950s with the observation by Schwartz and Dameshek that 6-mercaptopurine, developed as an antileukemic drug, was effective in blocking primary, but not secondary, antibody responses in ...

Knowledge of Whipple's disease started with Whipple's report in 1907 of a medical missionary with an illness that had begun five years earlier with episodes of arthritis but that subsequently included weight loss, cough, fever, diarrhea, hypotension, ...

It is not often that two seemingly separate lines of investigation converge to yield both a new insight into the pathogenesis of a disease and possibilities for clinical applications. Such is the case with an article by He et al., who report that the ...

For several years, there has been an awareness of the often harmful power of the “technological imperative” in the care of dying patients — that is, the compulsive use of technology to maintain life when palliative care would be more appropriate. There is ...

To the Editor: The international study of somatization and depression reported by Simon et al. (Oct. 28 issue)¹ raises issues that are pertinent to the practice of cross-cultural medicine in the United States. By demonstrating the similarities between ...

To the Editor: Some of the cases reported by Simon et al. (Oct. 7 issue)¹ as idiopathic eosinophilia could have been diagnosed as T-cell lymphoma or the Sézary syndrome from the inception. Although the authors considered a diagnosis of the Sézary ...

To the Editor: Mølbak et al. (Nov. 4 issue)¹ call attention to disparities between the results of in vitro tests of ciprofloxacin sensitivity in salmonella and treatment failure. The evolution of antibiotic resistance most often occurs in vivo, and some ...

To the Editor: Zanamivir (Relenza, Glaxo Wellcome, Research Triangle Park, N.C.), a neuraminidase inhibitor, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of uncomplicated influenzavirus infection. Zanamivir is marketed as a ...

To the Editor: In their article on heart-rate recovery after exercise as a predictor of mortality (Oct. 28 issue),¹ Cole et al. did not clearly define the “cessation” of exercise in their study, since there was a cool-down period that included exercise. ...

To the Editor: In our opinion, the diagnostic and preoperative approaches described by de Groen et al. in their review of biliary tract cancers (Oct. 28 issue)¹ are outdated. Patients with perihilar biliary tract tumors present with jaundice, and ...

To the Editor: The review of the toll-like receptors (TLRs) by Modlin et al. (June 10 issue)¹ contained some important errors. The authors contend that TLR2 signals the presence of endotoxin, and thus alerts the host to invading gram-negative bacteria. ...

To the Editor: Neurogenic urinary incontinence is most often due to detrusor hyperreflexia, and it is usually treated by partially blocking the efferent parasympathetic innervation to the detrusor muscle of the bladder with anticholinergic drugs. These ...

In the northern part of South Korea lies the Hantaan River, and during the Korean conflict in the 1950s, 3000 United Nations troops near the river became affected with fever and myalgias associated with renal disease and ecchymoses. The disorder was ...

In 1984, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced that, between the years 1979 and 1984, 90 percent of patients with hemophilia who were treated with clotting-factor concentrates had been infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). A ...

Immunology is in crisis. Despite advances in the knowledge of molecular mechanisms and therapies made in the past 25 years, the structure of the theory that has guided the discipline since the 1950s is collapsing. Irun Cohen, a leading experimental and ...