Safe, sensible, sagacious: responsible scanning of pacemaker patients

Doctors accepting flu vaccination is the sensible and responsible choice.

Patel’s jaunty and amusing article concludes with: “after all, how bad can man flu be?” The answer is that, for men and women, flu can be devastating and even lethal. This is especially true for sick and vulnerable patients. Patel misses the point: we should be vaccinated not only to keep us hard at work through those long winter days and nights, but also to prevent us getting flu and, despite ...

Safe MR scanning of patients with metallic middle ear implants

Safe use of art materials: who is responsible?

Background: Tobacco smoking is a growing public health problem in the developing world. There is paucity of data on smoking and predictors of smoking among school-going adolescents in most of sub-Saharan Africa. Hence, the aim of this study is to estimate the prevalence of smoking and its associations among school-going adolescents in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Methods: Data from the Global Youth T...

Safe and sensible preprocessing and baseline correction of pupil-size data

Measurement of pupil size (pupillometry) has recently gained renewed interest from psychologists, but there is little agreement on how pupil-size data is best analyzed. Here we focus on one aspect of pupillometric analyses: baseline correction, i.e., analyzing changes in pupil size relative to a baseline period. Baseline correction is useful in experiments that investigate the effect of some ex...

Pacemaker Twiddler's Syndrome

A 76-yr-old man with unipolar ventricular pacemaker, previously implanted in the right ventricular apex, presented with syncopal attack and twitching of the right pectoralis muscle. He finally was diagnosed as having Twiddler's syndrome. The patient had a pulse rate of 36/min and cannon waves in the neck veins. Chest radiography showed a dislodged pacing lead completely wrapped around the pulse...