Inheritance of a mutant BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene (numbers 113705 and 600185, respectively, in Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, a catalogue of inherited diseases) confers a lifetime risk of breast cancer of 50 to 85 percent and a lifetime risk of ovarian ...

In epidemiologic studies, moderate consumption of alcohol is consistently associated with a reduced risk of myocardial infarction; however, the mechanism underlying this association is unclear.¹–⁶ Some have suggested that the apparent benefit may reflect ...

Treatment with moderate, systemic hypothermia reduces the rates of cerebral edema and death after injury to the cerebral cortex in laboratory animals.¹–⁴ The results of early studies of hypothermia in humans with brain injury were inconclusive.⁵–⁹ ...

Rotavirus causes severe gastroenteritis and affects most infants in the United States. There are an estimated 3.5 million cases annually among children less than five years of age in this country, leading to 500,000 office visits, 50,000 hospitalizations, ...

Interstitial lung diseases are a heterogeneous group of disorders that are poorly understood at a molecular level.¹,² The cause is often unknown, and the histologic diagnoses used in adults may represent different disease processes in children.³–⁵ For ...

Figure 1. A 71-year-old man was pushed onto his back by a slow-moving vehicle. Initially, he was alert and fully oriented. In the emergency department, the patient was disoriented to place; the examination revealed no signs of injury, and coagulation ...

Icterus neonatorum, or neonatal jaundice, has long been recognized.¹ The term “kernicterus” was introduced in the early 1900s to refer to the yellow staining of the basal ganglia observed in infants who died with severe jaundice.² From the 1950s through ...

Presentation of Case

A 17-year-old girl was admitted to the hospital because of progressive jaundice and weight loss.

The patient had been well until four months earlier, when she experienced the onset of malaise, anorexia, a sore throat, and tender ...

Nearly coincident with the publication of the article by Hedenfalk et al.¹ in this issue of the Journal are reports of the complete DNA sequence of the human genome.²,³ This remarkable point in biomedical history marks the beginning of an era in which we ...

Traumatic brain injury is an important cause of death and disability in both civilians and military personnel.¹ In areas with organized trauma care systems and adequate critical care, the mortality from severe traumatic brain injury appears to have been ...

To the Editor: In 1997, Oregon legalized physician-assisted suicide.¹ In a follow-up to our previous reports,²,³ we assessed whether the numbers and characteristics of patients who died after the ingestion of legally prescribed lethal medications in 2000 ...

To the Editor: The studies by the Childhood Asthma Management Program Research Group¹ and by Agertoft and Pedersen² (Oct. 12 issue) suggest that the magnitude of the growth effect observed during the first year of therapy with inhaled corticosteroids in ...

To the Editor: O'Malley et al. (Nov. 2 issue),¹ conclude that psychological factors are not associated with subclinical coronary artery disease as assessed by electron-beam computed tomography. Most of the established factors that influence the risk of ...

To the Editor: With respect to the Image in Clinical Medicine entitled “Idiopathic Clubbing” (Oct. 26 issue),¹ it seems difficult to justify the use of right heart catheterization, a technique with a recognized risk of complications and even of death,² ...

To the Editor: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tabulates and reports AIDS cases in the United States biannually. Using these official data, we analyzed trends in the distribution of AIDS cases according to sex, race or ethnic group, ...

Every year in the United States, approximately 180,000 women receive a diagnosis of breast cancer. Almost no one is untouched by an association with the disease. Clinicians who provide care for women with breast cancer realize that their patients have a ...

No area of medicine is as driven by evidence of the effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) of treatment as medical oncology. Breast Cancer Management deals with evidence accrued from clinical trials of the prevention and treatment of breast cancer. The ...

As its title suggests, The Osteoporosis Primer aims to be an introductory textbook that relates the clinical presentation of osteoporosis to its biochemical basis. According to the preface, “It is aimed primarily at individuals who require an introduction ...