Acta medica Scandinavica. Supplementum
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Acta Med. Scand. Suppl. · Jan 1988
Review Comparative StudyGiving life, giving death: ethical problems of high-technology medicine.
High-technology medicine, such as dialysis and transplantation is limited and nowhere can all potential beneficiaries receive it. Although very successful, high-technology medicine sometimes makes dying to a cruel spectacle and patients whose lives depend on a machine want to stop. The resulting ethical questions revolve around just distribution of life support - giving life, and withdrawal of life support in giving death. ⋯ The decision did not seem to harm the surviving relatives, but the relatives complained of poor physician communication. Old patients had shorter survival on dialysis, were more often excluded from, and stopped dialyses ten times more often than young patients. However, the ratio of mortality on dialysis compared to the mortality in the population at large was higher in young than in old patients and the self-reported quality of life of the old patients was particularly high.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
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Acta Med. Scand. Suppl. · Jan 1988
ReviewThe associations between obesity, adipose tissue distribution and disease.
Recent research has shown the marked differences in association with disease between obesity localized to the abdominal respectively to the gluteal-femoral regions. In this review systematic analyses were performed of the associations between obesity (body mass index, BMI) or abdominal obesity (increased waist-over-hip circumference ratio, WHR) on the one hand, and a number of disease end points, and their risk factors, as well as other factors on the other, WHR was associated with cardiovascular disease, premature death, stroke, non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus and female carcinomas. In contrast, BMI tended to be negatively correlated to cardiovascular disease, premature death, and stroke, but positively to diabetes. ⋯ Women with high WHR were found to have a number of symptoms of poor coping to stress. It was therefore suggested that part of the background to this syndrome might be a hypothalamic arousal syndrome developing with stress. It was concluded that obesity and abdominal distribution of adipose tissue constitute two separate entities with different pathogenesis, clinical consequences and probably treatment.
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Acta Med. Scand. Suppl. · Jan 1982
Review Clinical Trial Controlled Clinical TrialRebound phenomena following withdrawal of long-term beta-adrenoceptor blockade.
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Acta Med. Scand. Suppl. · Jan 1976
ReviewFeasibility of physical training after myocardial infarction and its effect on return to work, morbidity and mortality.
The purpose of this work on patients with myocardial infarction was to find out whether physical rehabilitation based on spontaneous home training can be carried out in practice, and whether such rehabilitation brings about favourable changes in the symptoms, clinical findings and metabolic risk factors. A further objective was to find out whether the physical condition of the patients is improved, and whether the rehabilitation has any effect on the prognosis and return to work. The training group consisted of 180 patients, 143 men and 37 women. ⋯ The trainers and controls did not differ significantly as regards recidivous infarctions and coronary deaths. It should be noted, however, that the differences in both recidivous morbidity and coronary mortality were always in the same direction: the trainers had lower values of recidivous morbidity and coronary mortality than the controls. Training may have had an effect on the prognosis.