Chest
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A 54-year-old man was referred with nonresolving pneumonia. He had been treated for community-acquired pneumonia 6 weeks earlier. ⋯ He had also experienced three episodes of minimal hemoptysis but denied weight loss, fever, or any other constitutional symptoms. He was a nonsmoker and was being treated for dyslipidemia.
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The prognosis of N2 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) has been reported to be heterogeneous. The recently revised Japanese nodal classification subcategorizes N2 disease according to the tumor-bearing lobe. We evaluated the prognostic impact of the Japanese nodal classification and its ability to define favorable N2 disease in resected NSCLC. ⋯ The Japanese nodal classification is able to identify a favorable N2 subgroup in resected NSCLC. Nodal staging by the Japanese system should be considered when a clinical trial of N2 disease is designed.
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A 56-year-old man presented to the ED of an outside hospital with 2 days of bleeding gums and easy bruising. He denied episodes of melena, hematemesis, or hematuria and had no epistaxis. ⋯ A bone marrow biopsy confirmed the diagnosis of acute promyelocytic leukemia. He was transferred to our hospital for treatment.
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Patients with pulmonary arteriovenous malformations (PAVMs) are unusual because hypoxemia results from right-to-left shunting and not airway or alveolar disease. Their surprisingly well-preserved exercise capacity is not generally appreciated. ⋯ Patients with hypoxemia and PAVMs can maintain normal oxygen delivery/VO₂ during peak exercise. Following improvement of SaO₂ by embolization, patients appeared to reset compensatory mechanisms and, as a result, achieved similar peak VO₂ per heart beat and peak work rates.
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In the 13 years since their promulgation, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) rules and their enforcement have shown considerable evolution, as has the context within which they operate. Increasingly, it is the health information circulating outside the HIPAA-protected zone that is concerning: big data based on HIPAA data that have been acquired by public health agencies and then sold; medically inflected data collected from transactions or social media interactions; and the health data curated by patients, such as personal health records or data stored on smartphones. HIPAA does little here, suggesting that the future of health privacy may well be at the state level unless technology or federal legislation can catch up with state-of-the-art privacy regimes, such as the latest proposals from the European Commission.