Arch Surg Chicago
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The management of geriatric injured patients admitted to a trauma center includes the selective decision to provide comfort care only, including withdrawal of therapy, and a choice to not use full application of standard therapies. The decision makers in this process include multiple individuals in addition to the patient. ⋯ Withdrawal of therapy is a common event in the terminal care of geriatric injured patients. The process for reaching a decision regarding withdrawal of therapy is complex because in most circumstances patients' injuries preclude their full participation. Standards for documentation of essential information, including patients' preferences and decision-making ability, should be developed to improve the process and assist with recording these complicated decisions that often occur over several days of discussion.
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Neoadjuvant therapy has the potential to induce regression of high-risk, locally advanced cancers and render them resectable. Preoperative chemoradiotherapy is proposed as a testable treatment concept for locally advanced pancreatic cancer. ⋯ A pilot study of preoperative chemoradiotherapy with infusional cisplatin and radiation induced a high rate of clinical pathologic response in patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer and merits further study in these high-risk patients.
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Informed consent forms should document and reflect the goals of informed consent and shared decision making. We conducted this study to examine the extent to which informed consent for procedure forms meet accepted informed consent standards, how well state informed consent statutes correlate with these standards, and whether existing forms can enhance the interactions between patients and physicians or other health care providers. ⋯ The content of most forms did not meet accepted standards of informed consent or patient-physician interactions. We propose a form that more fully supports the models of ideal informed consent and shared decision making to enhance the applicability of informed consent in the clinical setting.
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Women deposit more collagen after major abdominal surgery than men. ⋯ Collagen deposition after surgery decreased significantly with age in men, while remaining unchanged in women. Younger men and women deposited similar amounts of collagen. Therefore, older men made less collagen after surgery than older women, perhaps explaining the consistent observation that wound dehiscence is twice as common in men than in women. Our results differ from previous studies conducted in healthy, nonsurgical volunteers, which showed that (1) young women made significantly more collagen than young men and (2) collagen deposition was reduced in postmenopausal women, but deposition returned to premenopausal values with hormone replacement therapy. Differences between our results and those reported previously likely stem from the populations studied. In particular, multiple perioperative factors decrease collagen deposition, which apparently obscures the differences observed previously in healthy, unstressed volunteers.