Preterm delivery remains the primary public health challenge in obstetrics. Infants who weigh less than 2500 g account for 11 percent of all births in the United States but for more than 90 percent of all neonatal deaths. Very-low-birth-weight infants, ...

Infants of very low birth weight (less than 1500 g) account for 1 percent of the annual births in the United States (about 40,000 births per year) and for the majority of neonatal deaths. The use of sophisticated technology for neonatal care has ...

The complex pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis includes inflammation and potentially disabling focal lesions that are associated with heterogeneous, often destructive pathologic changes disseminated throughout the white matter of the central nervous ...

The American people generally support and encourage medical research, but they also place a high priority on the privacy of personal medical information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 imposed new restraints on the use of medical information, with the intent of protecting patients' privacy. A side effect of the act is its application to clinical research. In a Legal Issues in Medicine article, Annas discusses the legal underpinnings and implications of the act, and in a Sounding Board article, Kulynych and Korn argue that the act will make the conduct of clinical research more burdensome and costly.

To the Editor: The results of the Clopidogrel in Unstable Angina to Prevent Recurrent Events (CURE) study (Aug. 16 issue)¹ suggest that the addition of clopidogrel to aspirin is beneficial for patients who have acute coronary syndromes without elevation ...

To the Editor: Akiyama and coworkers (Aug. 9 issue)¹ claim that motor vehicle accidents are no more common, or possibly less common, among patients who resume driving after ventricular tachyarrhythmias than in the general driving population. The reported ...

To the Editor: Villanueva et al. (Aug. 30 issue)¹ compared two treatments for recurrent bleeding from esophageal varices: endoscopic ligation and combined therapy with nadolol and isosorbide mononitrate. The initial dose of nadolol was 80 mg per day, and ...

To the Editor: The study by Macdonald and colleagues (Sept. 6 issue)¹ is commendable for its duration, detailed analysis, and quality control. However, we believe that the authors should have randomly assigned the patients to one of the two study groups ...

To the Editor: In the February 22 issue of the Journal, we reported a strong and temporal association between vaccination with rhesus–human reassortant rotavirus vaccine (RRV-TV) and intussusception, which we found by examining the rate of ...

Chest pain is a common presenting symptom in clinical practice, but is there a need for a new book devoted entirely to this subject? The answer is yes, with some qualifications. Chest Pain, a relatively short book, describes the multiple cardiac and ...

Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the United States and has resulted in disability in more than 4 million survivors of stroke. The economic burden of the approximately 700,000 new strokes annually is $20 billion to $40 billion in direct and ...

Americans support both protecting the privacy of medical records and encouraging medical research. Thus, it is not surprising that a move to change practices in these two areas has generated attention and comment. The new federal regulations, promulgated ...