One of the axioms in tobacco control is that today’s outrage from the tobacco industry will be eclipsed by tomorrow’s. Just when you think you’ve seen the worst possible transgression by the bad guys, something even worse comes along. The “outrage” in the spring of 1985 was an advertisement for Newport Lights which featured a pregnant woman, or at least a woman who looked pregnant—very pregnant...

word for consumption), was named by the father of allopathic medicine, Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BCE), because the disease appeared to consume the affected person through substantial weight loss and wasting (1). Hippocrates warned his students against treating persons in late stages of tuberculosis, because nearly all of their patients would die, which would likely tarnish their reputations as he...

Mitral valve prolapse: harbinger of death or variant of normal? It is 21 years since Barlow and colleagues recognised prolapse of the posterior leaflet of the mitral valve during angiography and related this to the auscultatory phenomena of the late systolic click and murmur.' Two years earlier in 1961 Reid, also from South Africa, had first proposed that the features were of mitral rather than...

PURPOSE To evaluate the efficacy of intracameral phenylephrine (IPH) administered as prophylaxis against intraoperative floppy iris syndrome (IFIS) and to analyze the ability of IPH to reverse IFIS. DESIGN Prospective, multicenter, randomized, comparative case series of fellow eyes. PARTICIPANTS Forty-two patients receiving tamsulosin who underwent cataract surgery between January and April...

M asterful mitral valve (MV) repair demands thorough understanding of integrated mitral apparatus structure and mechanics. One consistently reported feature, the saddle shape of the mitral annulus, was recognized in the process of resolving the contradiction posed by an apparently high prevalence of MV prolapse (MVP) in otherwise healthy individuals: A normal saddle-like shape will show opposit...

BACKGROUND Myxomatous mitral valve prolapse is a common cardiac abnormality. Morbus Barlow is characterized by excess myxomatous leaflet tissue, bileaflet prolapse or billowing, chordae elongation and annular dilatation with or without calcification. Extensive myxoid degeneration with destruction of the normal three-layered leaflet tissue architecture is observed histologically in such patients...

α-BlOcKeRS anD iFiS Tamsulosin was reportedly introduced in Japan in 1993, in the United Kingdom in 1997, and in the United States in 1997. Gupta et al related the popularity of the drug to its high affinity for the α1A receptor, which explains the lower incidence of adverse cardiovascular events in patients taking tamsulosin compared with less selective α-adrenergic blockers.3 Additionally, th...

K ES SL ER /R EU TE RS /C O RB IS The power flows freely at West Virginia Alloys. This factory, tucked into the Kanawha River valley about 50 kilometres upstream from Charleston, West Virginia, is the second largest consumer of electricity in the state. It routinely pulls more than 120 megawatts of power from the grid, directing it into five electric arc furnaces that heat quartz to about 1,500...

Accessible online at: http://BioMedNet.com/karger Dear Sir, I read with interest the report by Takeichi et al. [1] on the relationship between left atrial function and plasma levels of atrial natriuretic peptide in patients with various types of heart disease. I would like to make three comments. First, the term atrial natriuretic factor (ANF) is preferable to the term atrial natriuretic peptid...

Temperature microstructure casts are often analyzed to compute the diapycnal diffusivity Kρ in geophysical flows. In the present study, we analyze 17 microstructure casts obtained during a Kelvin-Helmholtz billowing event at the base of the upper mixed layer in Lake Erie. From these casts, the turbulence properties of the mixing event are investigated and six parameterizations are applied to de...