Abstract Background Although drug therapy for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has recently improved, treating patients with established disease, whose hands have three major deformities (thumb deformity, finger deformities, and ulnar drift), remains a challenge. The underlying complex pathophysiology makes understanding these difficult, comprehensive assessment methods require accumulated skill long ...

The Maintenance of Certification module series is designed to help the clinician structure his or her study in specific areas appropriate to his or her clinical practice. This article is prepared to accompany practice-based assessment of preoperative assessment, anesthesia, surgical treatment plan, perioperative management, and outcomes. In this format, the clinician is invited to compare his o...

BACKGROUND The optimal timing for cleft lip repair has yet to be established. Advances in neonatal anesthesia, along with a growing body of literature, suggesting benefits of earlier cleft lip and nasal repair, have set the stage for a reexamination of current practices. METHODS In this prospective study, cleft lip and nasal repair occurred on average at 34.8 days (13-69 days). Nasal correcti...

Cleft palate, with or without cleft lip, is one of the more common congenital malformations in man. Two recent English surveys have reported a birth incidence ofabout one in 600 (MacMahon and McKeown, 1953; Pleydell, 1960) and this conforms well to careful surveys carried out in other countries of Europe (Fogh-Andersen, 1942) and the U.S.A. (Ivy, 1957). For the past 10 years it has been the pra...

BACKGROUND Pregnancy registries for women taking anticonvulsant drugs have been developed to determine more efficiently the fetal risks of each drug. A total of 722 drug-exposed pregnancies are needed to identify a sevenfold increase in the rate of occurrence of a specific abnormality, such as spina bifida, with a frequency of 1 in 1,000. METHODS The infants with major malformations born to t...