Myringotomy with the insertion of tympanostomy tubes is the most common operation among children beyond the newborn period in the United States; an estimated 280,000 children younger than three years of age underwent the operation in 1996 (Kozak LJ: ...

Otitis media is the most common medical problem for which children in North America see a doctor¹,² and the most common reason for surgery in children.³–⁷ Standard surgical treatment is a myringotomy with insertion of a tympanostomy tube.⁸ In several ...

Colorectal cancer is the second most common cause of death from cancer in the United States.¹ Postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy improves the outcome in stage III (Dukes' stage C) colon cancer and is now widely accepted as standard therapy.²,³ Many ...

Estrogen receptors are located throughout the brain, especially in regions that are involved in learning and memory, such as the hippocampus and amygdala.¹ In animals, estrogen increases cholinergic and serotonergic activity and stimulates neuronal growth^...

Figure 1. A 56-year-old woman began to have pain and redness of the left leg the day after a six-hour car ride. Two days later she was found to have erythema and tenderness on the medial aspect of the left knee and moderate pitting edema of the left ...

Physicians, health care workers, members of the clergy, and laypeople throughout the world have accepted fully that a person is dead when his or her brain is dead. In the United States, the principle that death can be diagnosed by neurologic criteria (...

The annual incidence of venous thrombosis, one of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity, increases from 1 per 100,000 during childhood to 1 per 100 in old age.¹ In this article we will discuss conditions involving a genetic predisposition to ...

Presentation of Case

A 16-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital because of an altered mental and emotional status.

At an uncertain interval before admission, the patient began to have diarrhea. One week before admission, a sore throat and productive ...

A number of studies suggest that persistent middle-ear effusion in children has long-term effects on speech and language development, as well as development in general, although the studies vary in their assessment of the clinical importance of these ...

The use of estrogen-replacement therapy has been associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease¹ and preserved or enhanced cognitive performance in postmenopausal women.² Despite the consistency of these observations, there are lingering doubts ...

If one subject in health law and bioethics can be said to be at once well settled and persistently unresolved, it is how to determine that death has occurred. Once this determination involved simply the measurement of vital signs. It was as often ...

Anxiety is a ubiquitous and unavoidable experience of life. It can be adaptive but also debilitating. Anxiety involves subjective feelings (e.g., worry and a sense of threat), physiological responses (e.g., tachycardia and hypercortisolemia), and ...

To the Editor: An important point in Whooley and Simon's review article on managing depression in outpatients (Dec. 28 issue)¹ that needs greater emphasis is the differential diagnosis of depressive and bipolar disorders. Although most patients will ...

To the Editor: Samet et al. (Dec. 14 issue)¹ provide compelling, additional evidence of the link between outdoor air pollution — respirable particulate matter less than 10 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM₁₀), in particular — and mortality. One perplexing ...

To the Editor: Döhner and colleagues (Dec. 28 issue)¹ report that in a study of chromosomal abnormalities in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, patients with 17p deletions had a poor prognosis, with a median survival time of 32 months. Of the ...

To the Editor: The foreword to the 2001 edition of the Physicians' Desk Reference (PDR) states, “Each full-length entry provides you with an exact copy of the product's FDA [Food and Drug Administration]-approved labeling.”¹ The foreword goes on to say, “...

This book covers the history and social effects of the principal beverages that contain caffeine, notably coffee and tea. Products of cacao, chocolate that is eaten and drunk, and the soft drinks that contain caffeine (principally colas) are also covered. ...

Jha and Chaloupka, the editors of Tobacco Control in Developing Countries, dedicate the book to the approximately 100 million people who died of tobacco-related diseases in the 20th century. This dedication serves as an apt introduction to this concise ...

There has been considerable scientific, social, and economic interest in the study of the AIDS epidemic in Brazil, a developing country that ranks second only to the United States in the number of reported cases of AIDS (196,000 by September 2000). Since ...