Arch Intern Med
-
Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Is it worth treating fever in intensive care unit patients? Preliminary results from a randomized trial of the effect of external cooling.
Antipyresis is a common clinical practice in intensive care, although it is unknown if fever is harmful, beneficial, or a negligible adverse effect of infection and inflammation. ⋯ These results suggest that the systematic suppression of fever may not be useful in patients without severe cranial trauma or significant hypoxemia. Letting fever take its natural course does not seem to harm patients with systemic inflammatory response syndrome or influence the discomfort level and may save costs.
-
Anaphylaxis is a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction that affects both children and adults in the United States. However, data regarding the incidence and prevalence of anaphylaxis and the number of deaths caused by it are limited. ⋯ The occurrence of anaphylaxis in the US is not as rare as is generally believed. On the basis of our figures, the problem of anaphylaxis may, in fact, affect 1.21% to 15.04% of the US population.
-
Patients with infections are usually discharged from the hospital with antibiotics when afebrile and clinically improved. ⋯ The infectious diseases hospitalist discharged patients from the hospital earlier than the IM hospitalists by more efficient use of antibiotics. The earlier discharge did not adversely affect outcomes.
-
Letter Case Reports
Reduction of buffalo hump by switching to amprenavir in an HIV-infected patient.
-
Meta Analysis Comparative Study
A search for sex differences in response to analgesia.
It is generally accepted that males and females respond differently to painful conditions. With few exceptions, according to the published literature, females demonstrate a lower pain threshold and a lower tolerance of painful stimuli. There is some support in the literature that females experience greater analgesic efficacy than do males after the administration of narcotic analgesics. We compared the analgesic response of females and males to ibuprofen in a post-third-molar extraction dental pain model. ⋯ Our results demonstrated no sex effect on the analgesic response to ibuprofen. These results were obtained under the post-third-molar extraction setting, in which the least possible confounding factors are present. To fully establish the generality of this phenomenon, studies should be carried out in other pain models and using analgesic medications with different mechanisms of action. Arch Intern Med. 2000;160:3424-3428.