Race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) are associated with the use of Medicare services. In this article, the author juxtaposes disparities in health outcome measures (including death rates for heart disease, cancer, and stroke) with disparities in the use of elective services expected to improve health, and with disparities in the use of non-elective services associated with poor manage...

Letter to the Editor With interest we read the article by Marseglia et al. about a 6yo boy with nemaline myopathy (NM) but without evidence for previous cardiac disease who experienced non-triggered asystole, underwent prolonged resuscitation, and died 1 week later from secondary cerebral hypoxia [1]. We have the following comments and concerns. Was the previous history positive for palpitation...

Oxidative stress is a major mediator of adverse outcomes throughout the course of transplantation. Transplanted kidneys are prone to oxidative stress-mediated injury by pre-transplant and post-transplant conditions that cause reperfusion injury or imbalance between oxidants and antioxidants. Besides adversely affecting the allograft, oxidative stress and its constant companion, inflammation, ca...

A scar is an expected result of wound healing. However, in some individuals, and particularly in burn victims, the wound healing processes may lead to a fibrotic hypertrophic scar, which is raised, red, inflexible and responsible for serious functional and cosmetic problems. It seems that a wide array of subsequent processes are involved in hypertrophic scar formation, like an affected haemosta...

Delay in diagnosis can be serious in amoebic hepatic abscess, which is readily treatable. Two cases are presented to illustrate potential causes of delay. The first case had never been to an endemic area, apparently contracting the infection from his wife. The second case had negative serological tests.

Young veterinary graduates met at the House of Lords last month to discuss the causes of disillusionment being reported by those in the early years of their careers, and to propose solutions. The meeting captured the views of veterinarians working in both clinical and non-clinical roles, including graduates working outside the veterinary sector. Anthony Ridge, parliamentary intern to Lord Trees...

This paper presents two studies on narrow bracketing and myopic loss aversion. The first study shows that the tendency to segregate multiple gambles is eliminated if subjects face a certainty equivalent or a probability equivalent task instead of a binary choice. The second study argues that the behavioral differences previously attributed entirely to myopic loss aversion are partly because lon...

P neumonia, along with influenza, is currently the eighth leading overall cause of death in the USA, and is the leading cause of infectious death [1]. However, this only considers the immediate impact of an episode of pneumonia on mortality. Almost all research on pneumonia has focused on mortality in the first 30–90 days after presentation [2]. However, there is growing interest in the effects...

Little is known about causes of death in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and the validity of mortality statistics in COPD. The present authors examined causes of death using data from the Copenhagen City Heart Study. Of the 12,979 subjects with sufficient data from the baseline examination during 1976-1978, 6,709 died before 2001. Of these, 242 died with COPD as cause of death. Amo...

Here I advance a hypothesis that neurodegeneration is a natural process associated with aging due to the loss of genetic redundancy following a mathematical model R(t) = R0(1-αe), where the calorie intake (C) and immune response (I) play critical roles. The early onset of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease is due to metabolic imbalance or chronic immune reactions to various ...