NEJM 8 May 2014 Vol 370 1799 The idea that malaria was spread by mosquitoes was first mooted in the 1870s, but it took twenty years to work out what really went on in the parasite’s life cycle. As far as I can tell, this was first achieved by Giovanni Batista Grassi, though Ronald Ross […]
NEJM 1 May 2014 Vol 370 1702 Britons, mourn. Our biggest drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, had a potential blockbuster on its hands. Darapladib would stabilise unstable plaque, everybody would want to take it, and GSK would make billions. But, although darapladib is a selective oral inhibitor of lipoprotein associated phospholipase A2, which is an enzyme associated […]
NEJM 24 Apr 2014 Vol 370 1583 The New England Journal has put so many good articles online first lately that I’ve left myself with thin pickings this week. This big French study of blood pressure targets in septic shock has been on the website for some weeks, and I didn’t comment on it sooner […]
NEJM 17 Apr 2014 Vol 370 1494 Back in the 1970s, people used to say that we had entered an era of safe surgery and dangerous medicine. I find it odd that people are now trying to make surgery safer by using a variety of moderately dangerous drugs on healthy people about to have operations. […]
NEJM 10 Apr 2014 Vol 370 OL A deadly virus has been conquered. Hepatitis C genotype 1 can be cleared with a simple oral combination treatment, and compared to that, the rest of this week’s medical news seems minor. So I will start by running through the hepatitis C papers which have just appeared on […]
NEJM 3 Apr 2014 Vol 370 1287 Multitarget stool testing, you will be pleased to hear, is not the most important topic in the NEJM this week. There is in fact so much else on the NEJM website that I could take up the whole review dealing with nothing but online papers. So let us […]
NEJM 27 Mar 2014 Vol 370 1189 I sing the body mitotic: we are a mass of cells dividing, mutating, cannibalizing, spreading. The wonder is not that we ever die of cancer, but that we often don’t. Cells which become aggressive are extraordinarily versatile at remaining aggressive, as shown by the relatively rare ALK-Rearranged Non–Small-Cell […]
NEJM 20 Mar 2014 Vol 370 1091 Please follow these instructions carefully: 1. Remove half of the skull, taking care to ensure you have chosen the appropriate side. 2. Repair the dura over the swollen brain and replace the scalp. 3. Wrap the removed skull and place in a refrigerator, choosing a shelf free of […]
NEJM 13 Mar 2014 Vol 370 1029 Doctors, by and large, make bad scientists. We train our minds for years in some of the hardest intellectual disciplines, and then make do with the sloppiest excuse for thought when it comes to believing what we wish to. All of us learned, at some time between the […]
NEJM 6 Mar 2014 Vol 370 901 The cat and mouse game of man versus human immunodeficiency virus has just taken a new turn. HIV kills off CD4 T cells by binding to the CCR5 receptor. Now if you could manufacture CD4 T cells without a functioning CCR5 receptor, the virus would not be able […]