JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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We compared a sample of 200 patients who filed a claim of malpractice or negligence against a large urban teaching hospital and its physicians, with a randomly drawn sample of 549 patients who had never filed a claim against the hospital. The two groups were compared on distributions by race, religion, occupation, age, and sex. ⋯ Claimants were significantly older than nonclaimants (P less than .05). Women filed a statistically nonsignificant greater number of claims than men did (P greater than .20).
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Estrogen treatment of postmenopausal women is effective in relieving the symptoms of vasomotor instability and urogenital atrophy; estrogen treatment is effective in preventing accelerated bone loss and osteoporosis in young women following castration, but in postmenopausal women aging is a more important determinant of accelerated bone loss than is decreased estrogen secretion. Low-dose estrogen treatment of postmenopausal women neither prevents nor increases the risk of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease or cerebral vascular disease. It cannot be definitively established that estrogen treatment of postmenopausal women causes an increased incidence of breast tumors, but it is clear that such treatment does not prevent these tumors. It is established that estrogen treatment of postmenopausal women increases the risk ratio of endometrial carcinoma.
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A follow-up study of 311 patients who acquired rheumatic fever in Nashville, Tenn, during the period from 1963 to 1969 showed that 53% took penicillin prophylaxis regularly, 36% did not take it as recommended, and 11% did not take it at all. There were no recurrences among those who received prophylaxis by injection regularly, six recurrences among those who took oral prophylaxis regularly, and no recurrences among 45 subjects who did not take prophylaxis. ⋯ The original study indicated that the incidence of acute rheumatic fever among blacks was twice as high as among whites. In the present study, incidence of rheumatic heart disease and recurrences was substantially higher among blacks than among whites.