Background Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a large burden on the healthcare system. Medicines are the primary treatment for these diseases; however, adherence to therapy is low. To optimise treatment and health outcomes for patients, it is important that adherence to cardiovascular medicines is maintained at an optimal level. Therefore, identifying ...

Welcome to the first issue of 2012 of Cardiovascular & Hematological Agents in Medicinal Chemistry. I hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday season and I want to wish everyone a wonderful New Year. As you are aware, our journal aims to cover the latest and outstanding developments in medicinal ...

Patients with cardiovascular disease may be especially prone to the adverse effects of complementary medicines.

Hypoplastic left heart syndrome remains one of the most challenging pathologies in pediatric cardiac surgery. The surgical techniques, and anesthetic and intensive care management, have evolved over the last decades, which has resulted in improved outcomes. A central component in the postoperative management of hypoplastic left heart syndrome patients is ...

This paper promotes a reflection on the relationship between daily practices and consumption. Understanding how conflicts, resistance and consensus are generated from daily consumption practices opens up possibilities for reflecting on the construction of sustainability in the context of diversity, one of the landmarks of the globalized world. Within this ...

New developments at King's College, London, suggest that the complexity of modern cardiovascular medicine, and the enormous prospects for future advances, means that smaller cities will find it hard to compete, reports Barry Shurlock, MA, PhD.

The acutely failing Fontan circulation requires urgent management to decompress the systemic venous pressures and augment cardiac output. This may involve the use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support to preserve life. Catheter-based effective Fontan takedown is an alternative to surgery in these patients, who are acutely unstable, and offers the ...

Preoperative cardiovascular management is an essential component of overall perioperative cardiovascular care. It involves preoperative detection and management of cardiovascular disease and prediction of both short- and long-term cardiovascular risk. It thereby not only affects anaesthetic perioperative management (e.g. choice of anaesthetic drug and method, type of monitoring, and postoperative ...

We aimed to assess whether routine data produced by an electronic prescribing system might be useful in identifying doctors at higher risk of making a serious prescribing error. Retrospective analysis of prescribing by junior doctors over 12 months using an electronic prescribing information and communication system. The system issues a ...

Laboratory Medicine represents a major component of healthcare and nowadays it is involved in more than seventy percent of medical decisions. The value of any innovative laboratory test will depend on its clinical sensitivity and specificity. This clinical value is of course influenced by the analytical performance and reliability of ...

Although interpersonal style is a defining feature of personality and personality disorder and is commonly identified as an important influence on aggressive behavior, treatment completion, and the development of an effective therapeutic alliance, it is rarely considered in practice guidelines for preventing, engaging, and managing patients at risk of aggression. ...

Despite treatment improvement and performance management imperatives, little research describes the data management capacity of substance abuse treatment programs, and useful metrics are not available to gauge capacity. This exploratory study evaluates clinical and administrative data management at eight substance abuse treatment programs in four US states to identify factors ...

The experience of the International Society of Addiction Medicine in setting up the first international certification of clinical knowledge is reported. The steps followed and the results of a psychometric analysis of the tests from the first 65 candidates are reported. Lessons learned in the first 5 years and challenges ...

Background: In order to ensure the reliability of clinical practice guidelines it is essential to consider potential conflicts of interest with regard to its development. Methods: All valid dermatological practice guidelines, which were developed by the German Dermatologic Society (DDG) or the Professional Association of German Dermatologists (BVDD), were recorded. ...

The Hunterian Laboratory of Experimental Medicine, established at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1905, played a central role in the early history of American surgery. Created primarily by William Halsted with the help of Harvey Cushing, the Laboratory was a cornerstone of experimental surgical research as well as surgical education. ...

This short version of the interdisciplinary S3 guideline on hormone therapy in peri- and postmenopause (HT) is intended as a decision-making instrument for physicians and women considering HT. It is designed to assist daily practice. This short version summarises the long version that contains detailed information about the development of ...

Practice variation in transplant physician management of immune suppression (IS) after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) is anticipated to have important consequences, but has not been characterized to date. We conducted a national survey of transplant physician members of the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation to discern variation ...

For the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), a prescription for a patient often contains several herbs. Some herbs are often used together in prescriptions, and these herbs can be considered as a functional group. In this paper, we propose an approach for discovering herbal functional groups from a large set of ...

ABSTRACT: INTRODUCTION: Due to the increasing burden on hospital systems, most elderly patients with non-surgical sepsis are admitted to general internal medicine departments. Disease-severity scoring systems are used for stratification of patients for utilization management, performance assessment, and clinical research. Some widely used scoring systems for septic patients are inappropriate ...

Noise impacts resources and visitor experience in many protected natural areas, and visitors can be the dominant source of noise. This experimental study tested the efficacy and acceptability of signs asking visitors to be quiet at Muir Woods National Monument, California. Signs declaring a "quiet zone" (at the park's Cathedral ...

Over the last decade, polar surface area (PSA) has become a ubiquitous term in medicinal and computational chemistry circles. This article charts the development of the increasingly efficient methods for the calculation of PSA before illustrating its usefulness through selected examples drawn from the medicinal chemistry literature. Consideration of PSA ...

In the UK, approaches to policy implementation, service improvement and quality assurance treat policy, management and clinical care as separate, hierarchical domains. They are often based on the central knowledge transfer (KT) theory idea that best practice solutions to complex problems can be identified and 'rolled out' across organisations. When ...

This article reviews the use of informatics and computational chemistry methods in medicinal chemistry, with special consideration of how computational techniques can be adapted and extended to obtain more and higher-quality information. Special consideration is given to the computation of protein-ligand binding affinities, to the prediction of off-target bioactivities, bioactivity ...

A substantial component of BRAC's WASH programme involves educating rural Bangladeshis about safe water management, good hygiene and the causes of diarrhoea. By conducting questionnaires and focus group discussions in two BRAC WASH villages and one control village, this investigation sought to assess the impact of BRAC's programme on knowledge, ...

Recent years have seen the expanding presence of hospitalists, most prominently in internal medicine, but also in other areas such as neurology, pediatrics, and psychiatry. In contrast to a burgeoning literature on general medicine hospitalists, very little has been written about the role of psychiatric hospitalists-psychiatrists who work exclusively in ...

The authors argue that over time the difference between team members' perception of the organizational support received by the team (or team climate for organizational support) and their manager's perception of the organizational support received by the team has an effect on important outcomes and emergent states, such as team ...

In most of the long history of the study of absolute identification-since Miller's (1956) seminal article-a severe limit on performance has been observed, and this limit has resisted improvement even by extensive practice. In a startling result, Rouder, Morey, Cowan, and Pfaltz (2004) found substantially improved performance with practice in ...

Objectives To determine the frequencies and types of limitation of medical treatment performed by physician members of the German Society for Palliative Medicine and to analyse the findings with respect to clinical and ethical aspects of end-of-life practices. Design Cross-sectional postal survey. Setting Data collection via the secretary of the ...

Problem addressed There is a lack of consensus around the optimal way to train family medicine residents to care for children. Objective of program Evaluation of an ambulatory versus an inpatient pediatrics rotation for family medicine residents. Program description A 4-week pediatrics rotation for second-year family medicine residents was introduced ...

Abdul Latif L, Daud Amadera JE, Pimentel D, Pimentel T, Fregni F. Sample size calculation in physical medicine and rehabilitation: a systematic review of reporting, characteristics, and results in randomized controlled trials. To assess systematically the reporting of sample size calculation in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in 5 leading journals ...

The aim of this study was to quantify and assess the levels of evidence of research and review articles published in professional Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine journals with international circulations. Quantitative analysis of articles published in Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine journals. Selected articles from 7 Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine journals, ...

This study examined whether automatic stereotypes captured by the implicit association test (IAT) can predict real hiring discrimination against the obese. In an unobtrusive field experiment, job applications were sent to a large number of real job vacancies. The applications were matched on credentials but differed with respect to the ...

Studies in the last several years have consistently shown radiofrequency ablation (RFA) to be effective, safe, and well tolerated in the treatment of nondysplastic and dysplastic Barrett's esophagus (BE). The results found at academic medical centers have been reproduced in the community setting. RFA provides a safe and cost-effective alternative ...

International travel is a frequent occurrence in the life of the elite athlete; such travel can pose challenges to the sport medicine practitioner. Travel is also the reality of many recreational level or subelite athletes as opportunities for international competition and training proliferate. An appreciation of the range of responsibilities ...

Background: To ensure rapid access to new potentially beneficial health technologies, obtain best value for money, and ensure affordability, healthcare payers are adopting a range of innovative reimbursement approaches that may be called Managed Entry Agreements (MEAs).Methods: The Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) Policy Forum sought to identify why MEAs ...

OBJECTIVE: Goal attainment scaling represents a unique approach to identifying and quantifying individualized, meaningful treatment outcomes, and its use in the rehabilitation medicine setting is increasing. The aim of this paper is to discuss the available literature for goal attainment scaling in patients with acquired brain injury, in terms of ...

Will the 21st century doctor be any different from the 20th century doctor, or different from doctors from centuries past? Do doctors need to be different? Do patients want different? The Royal College of Physicians, alone and with partners, has set out recently to throw light on these questions, concluding ...

Erythema ab igne (EAI) is a reticulated, telangiectatic, and hyperpigmented skin eruption resulting from chronic exposure to long-term moderate heat. The incidence has decreased substantially today because of the advent of modern central heating systems. Recently, we encountered a patient who developed EAI after 2 weeks of footbaths with Chinese ...

The relationship between hypertension and chronic kidney disease (CKD) is bidirectional in nature and, generally, management strategies for cardiovascular risk reduction also attenuate progression of CKD. Prevalent hypertension increases with diminishing kidney function, and the management strategy changes with level of kidney function. In this review, we will examine the ...

ACADEMIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE 2011; 18:1-3 © 2011 by the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine ABSTRACT: Effective communication is the key component of every patient-physician encounter and is essential for shared decision-making. "Words" are perhaps the most frequently dispensed "drug," while communication is the most frequently performed "procedure" in emergency medicine. ...

In 5 studies, we investigated the relation between regulatory focus and the tendency to copy a role model's managing behavior after one experiences this behavior as its recipient and later takes on the same managing role. Because enacting role-related behaviors fulfills interpersonal norms that fit prevention concerns, we predicted a ...

Ankaferd Blood Stopper (ABS), a unique traditional herbal mixture, has been used topically to stop bleeding for centuries in Anatolia. ABS is a standardized mixture of the plants Thymus vulgaris, Glycyrrhiza glabra, Vitis vinifera, Alpinia officinarum, and Urtica dioica. Through its effects on the endothelium, blood cells, angiogenesis, cellular proliferation, ...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the needs of internal medicine residents rotating through the emergency department (ED). A survey was distributed to 100 internal medicine residents (post-graduate years 2 and 3) from two different residency programs before the start of their emergency medicine (EM) rotation. Residents ranked ...

The purpose of this study is to examine Electronic Health Record (EHR) adoption among Florida doctors who treat the elderly. This analysis contributes to the EHR adoption literature by determining if doctors who disproportionately treat the elderly differ from their counterparts with respect to the utilization of an important quality-enhancing ...

To examine the relationship of organizational characteristics of substance abuse treatment centers with their use of quality management practices (total quality management [TQM]) and the contribution of TQM use to a center's provision of comprehensive care and to use of evidence-based treatment practices. Data were collected from a national sample ...

A multidisciplinary approach to the treatment and management of biofilms has resulted from the growing appreciation of the role that biofilms play in modern medicine. Conventional antimicrobial agents are generally ineffective against biofilms, and as a result novel laboratory-based and clinical strategies have emerged. The purpose of this review is ...

While the exact cause of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is still unknown, modern medicine has a number of effective treatments for this complex disorder. Corticosteroid hormones help reduce inflammation, antimalarial treatments address flare-ups and immunosuppressive medications work to keep the immune system in check. All these therapies are well tolerated, ...

Objectives:  To survey Fellows of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (FACEMs) in order to describe current ultrasound (US) usage during central venous catheter (CVC) placement and to compare practice and opinions between FACEMs routinely using US and those not. Methods:  Descriptive and analytical cross-sectional electronic survey of all FACEMs. ...

The management of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia is currently undergoing profound changes. Several drugs like bendamustine, alemtuzumab and rituximab have recently been approved for CLL treatment by regulatory agencies. New and very promising compounds like lenalidomide, ofatumumab, GA101, flavopiridol, or ABT-263 are currently investigated in clinical trials and are likely to ...

Psoriasis is a long-term condition affecting 2-3% of the population. The mainstay of treatment for mild-moderate disease is the regular application of topical medication by the individual. At present little is known about how people with psoriasis self-manage and how they may best be supported in this endeavour. To explore ...