Mayo Clinic proceedings
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Tuberculosis (TB) poses a serious threat to public health throughout the world but disproportionately afflicts low-income nations. Persons in close contact with a patient with active pulmonary TB and those from endemic regions of the world are at highest risk of primary infection, whereas patients with compromised immune systems are at highest risk of reactivation of latent TB infection (LTBI). Tuberculosis can affect any organ system. ⋯ Health care professionals should collaborate, when possible, with local and state public health departments to care for patients with TB. Patients with drug-resistant TB or coinfection with human immunodeficiency virus should be treated in collaboration with TB specialists. Public health measures to prevent the spread of TB include appropriate respiratory isolation of patients with active pulmonary TB, contact investigation, and reduction of the LTBI burden.
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Mayo Clinic proceedings · Apr 2011
Influence of comorbid conditions on one-year outcomes in non-ST-segment elevation acute coronary syndrome.
To investigate comorbid conditions with prognostic influence in non-ST-segment elevation acute coronary syndrome (NSTEACS). ⋯ Renal dysfunction, dementia, peripheral artery disease, previous heart failure, and previous myocardial infarction are the comorbid conditions that predict mortality in NSTEACS. A simple index using these variables proved to be as accurate as the more complex comorbidity indices for risk stratification. In-hospital management of patients with comorbid conditions merits further investigation.
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The treatment of chronic illnesses commonly includes the long-term use of pharmacotherapy. Although these medications are effective in combating disease, their full benefits are often not realized because approximately 50% of patients do not take their medications as prescribed. Factors contributing to poor medication adherence are myriad and include those that are related to patients (eg, suboptimal health literacy and lack of involvement in the treatment decision-making process), those that are related to physicians (eg, prescription of complex drug regimens, communication barriers, ineffective communication of information about adverse effects, and provision of care by multiple physicians), and those that are related to health care systems (eg, office visit time limitations, limited access to care, and lack of health information technology). ⋯ Manual sorting of the 405 retrieved articles to exclude those that did not address cardiovascular disease, medication adherence, or health literacy in the abstract yielded 127 articles for review. Additional references were obtained from citations within the retrieved articles. This review surveys the findings of the identified articles and presents various strategies and resources for improving medication adherence.