Journal of general internal medicine
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Residents have a major role in teaching students, yet little has been written about the effects of resident work hour restrictions on medical student education. ⋯ Whereas resident duty hour restrictions at our institution have had minimal effect on students' ratings of the overall teaching quality, they do report being taught more by their residents. This may be a factor of decreased resident fatigue or an increased sense of well-being; but more study is needed to clarify the causes of our observations.
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Case Reports
The simultaneous occurrence of deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary and arterial embolization.
A 45-year-old female presented with 8 hours of right lower extremity pain and dyspnea. She was tachycardic and her right lower extremity was dusky, cold, and pulseless. ⋯ We hypothesize that our patient developed deep venous thrombosis that led to major pulmonary embolization and increased right-sided pressures. In the setting of a patent foramen ovale, a later venous embolus transversed the PFO and lodged in the femoral artery. Our case illustrates the importance of a high index of suspicion for a paradoxical embolus in patients with arterial thrombosis.
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Cardiac amyloidosis can result from any of the systemic amyloidoses. The disease is often characterized by a restrictive cardiomyopathy although the particular signs and symptoms depend in part on the underlying cause. In addition to managing the symptoms of heart failure, treatment options vary depending on the etiology of amyloid deposition. ⋯ We present a patient with presumed immunoglobulin (AL) amyloidosis who had a circulating lambda monoclonal protein, but a bone marrow biopsy with kappa predominant plasma cells. This unusual finding called into question the diagnosis of AL amyloidosis and highlights the importance and difficulty of determining the cause of cardiac amyloid deposition before initiating treatment. We review the different forms of cardiac amyloidosis and propose a diagnostic algorithm to help identify the etiology of cardiac amyloid deposition before beginning therapy.