More articles from Medical Grand Rounds
- Immune thrombocytopenia: No longer ‘idiopathic’
Once regarded as idiopathic, immune thrombocytopenia is now understood to involve both accelerated platelet destruction and impaired platelet production.
- How to manage type 2 diabetes in medical and surgical patients in the hospital
Many patients admitted to the hospital have diabetes mellitus—diagnosed or undiagnosed—and others develop hyperglycemia from the stress of hospitalization.
- Ending LGBT invisibility in health care: The first step in ensuring equitable care
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals experience health care disparities that will be eliminated only if clinicians elicit information in a thoughtful, nonjudgmental way.
- Seek and treat: HIV update 2011
Clinicians should routinely and matter-of-factly test patients for human immunodeficiency virus infection, just as they screen for other diseases.
- Vitamin D and the heart: Why we need large-scale clinical trials
Despite enthusiasm for vitamin D, no large-scale primary prevention trial has used cardiovascular disease or cancer as a prespecified primary outcome.
- What’s new in treating older adults?
Recent studies and trials regarding bone loss, dialysis outcomes, dementia, and other topics.
- Alzheimer disease prevention: Focus on cardiovascular risk, not amyloid?
Efforts to modify the course of Alzheimer disease have, until now, been based on altering the production or clearance of beta-amyloid. Results have been disappointing.
- Controversies in non-ST-elevation acute coronary syndromes and percutaneous coronary interventions
An update on recent studies of treatment strategies, including stenting and antiplatelet agents.
Beyond office sphygmomanometry: Ways to better assess blood pressureSeveral new devices provide more information than does traditional sphygmomanometry about the patient’s true hypertensive status, blood pressure control, and risk of end-organ damage.
- Update on 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus
The approaches to vaccination, prophylaxis, and treatment will be more complex this year. Unsuspected cases of influenza in hospitalized patients or health care workers working with influenza pose the greatest threat for transmission of influenza within the hospital. Health care workers need to stay home when sick.
