Minnesota medicine
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Pediatric impalement injuries to the rectum are rare, and delays in diagnosis can be life threatening. We report the case of a young girl who was accidentally impaled on a dive stick. A review of historical aspects of rectal trauma and current management techniques are discussed. ⋯ In contrast, most rectal injuries in adults are caused by missile wounds. Moreover, because rectal injury is fairly uncommon in children, physicians evaluating patients may miss signs of serious injury. Signs of external trauma may be minimal when rectal perforation exists, so delays in diagnosis are not uncommon.
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Medical developments are front-page news, and many health-related news reports are based on articles from the medical research literature. We analyzed the subjects and sources of literature-based medical news articles that appeared in Minnesota's largest newspaper, the Star Tribune, from May 1994 through December 2002. Data were collected by searching Health and Medicine in the News (http://www.biomed.lib.umn.edu/hmed), an online database that catalogues Star Tribune articles on health and medical topics. ⋯ We compared the most common subjects covered in the news articles with those covered in MEDLINE and with the most common causes of death in the United States. Diet, smoking, AIDS, and Alzheimer's disease are represented much more often in the Star Tribune than in the medical literature in general, and articles on genetics and pregnancy were found much more often in the medical literature than in this sample of newspaper articles. Cancer and heart disease, which were the first and third most-often-covered topics in the Star Tribune, are 2 of the 3 top causes of death in this country.