Although clots in the lung (pulmonary embolism or PE) are the second-leading cause of sudden death in the United States, blood tests and ultrafast CT scanning to detect PE are being used on so many patients that over 90% of these tests are negative.
There is some belief that Emergency Departments are being used for nonemergency medical care. In particular, do Medicaid recipients and uninsured patients overutilize ED for services better provided in other settings? In two studies conducted at Oregon Health and Science University, to be presented at the 2007 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Annual Meeting, researchers have investigated some common assumptions about ED use and found some surprising results.
Bronchiolitis, a wheezing much like asthma in adults, is responsible for many hospital admissions of infants. It is the commonest cause of hospital admission in this age group. There are two drugs in general use to treat this condition, epinephrine and albuterol, and there is some controversy and passion involved in the choice of medication.
Using the new and highly publicized CDC guidelines for HIV screening, a university-based Emergency Department implemented opt-out screening in Washington, DC, where HIV infection rates are known to be high.
US soldiers in Iraq do not carry the bacteria responsible for difficult-to-treat wound infections found in military hospitals treating soldiers wounded in Iraq, according to an article to be published electronically on Wednesday, May 16, 2007, in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.
The increase in the number of diagnosed cases of autism in recent years has sparked concern that environmental toxins may cause this complex disorder.
More than 215,000 people will die of sepsis in the United States each year, more than 750,000 will require hospital treatment, and the costs will be nearly $17 billion.
Hurricane Katrina was the most significant natural disaster to strike the United States. Thousands of people were exposed to destruction, human violence and desperate circumstances. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was likely to be a significant medical issue in the aftermath of Katrina.
The Southwest Oncology Group, the largest of several National Cancer Institute-sponsored clinical trials networks, has permanently closed enrollment in a trial comparing a standard drug therapy, dexamethasone, with a combined therapy of the same drug plus the drug lenalidomide (Revlimid) for people newly diagnosed with multiple myeloma.
The Mount Sinai Medical Center is the only hospital in New York City using the Novalis Shaped Beam Surgery System on spinal cancer.