Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine, New York

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This article reviews a selection of undergraduate programs intended to increase successful minority participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors, potentially leading to biomedical careers. The object is to examine their structure, consider how well they address the issues of the target population, and assess the extent to which they have met/meet their goals. As a means of conducting this review, the first step is to examine the concepts used as the building blocks for program design...

The potential benefits of the electronic health record over traditional paper are many, including cost containment, reductions in errors, and improved compliance by utilizing real-time data. The highest functional level of the electronic health record (EHR) is clinical decision support (CDS) and process automation, which are expected to enhance patient health and healthcare. The authors provide an overview of the progress in using patient data more efficiently and effectively through clinical decision support to improve health care delivery, how decision support impacts anesthesia practice, and how some are leading the way using these systems to solve need-specific issues...

BACKGROUND: AA amyloidosis is a systemic disease characterized by the extracellular deposition of amyloid fibrils derived from the acute-phase reactant serum amyloid A protein. It is typically a consequence of chronic inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis or Crohn's disease, although more patients are being identified who have more unusual causes or no known inflammatory stimulus. METHODS: We performed a retrospective chart review of all patients with AA amyloidosis seen at Mount Sinai during the period of 1997-2012...

Traditional risk factors explain most of the risk associated with coronary heart disease, and after adjustment for risk factors family history was believed to contribute very little to population-attributable risk of coronary heart disease. However, the INTERHEART study demonstrated an independent association of family history of coronary heart disease with acute myocardial infarction. To assess this relationship more comprehensively in multiple datasets in different populations, we carried out a detailed review of the available evidence...

Nonvalvular atrial fibrillation increases in prevalence with age and often requires long-term oral anticoagulation to prevent ischemic stroke. Vitamin K antagonists are highly effective for stroke prevention. However, suboptimal risk assessment, variability in response, drug and food interactions, and monitoring requirements result in underprescription of warfarin by physicians and poor adherence to therapy by patients. In addition, the vitamin K antagonists modulate coagulation by inhibiting multiple coagulation factors (factors II, VII, IX, and X)...

The rate of acute complications of atherosclerosis (acute myocardial infarction, ischemic stroke) has continuously decreased over the last 20 years in Western countries. This is largely explained by improvements in the reduction and treatment of cardiovascular risk factors and by the increasing number of patients who benefit from preventive treatments such as antiplatelet, lipid-lowering, or antihypertensive drugs. This means also that, when testing new drugs aimed at either halting or even reversing the progression of atherosclerotic plaques, a large number of patients will need to be included in clinical trials to demonstrate an improvement in patient outcome with the drugs...

Cardiovascular-disease prevention is often inadequate due to several factors. Lack of professional adherence to guidelines, unaffordable medication, and lack of patients' adherence to treatment are the most important. It has been suggested that an affordable, fixed-dose combination drug containing evidence-based active compounds could improve cardiovascular prevention by improving patients' adherence to treatment. The available evidence suggests that the polypill strategy can achieve this objective and it will gain a place in the therapeutic armamentarium for the prevention of cardiovascular events in patients at high risk...

There is an important correlation between vascular risk factors and nonspecific imaging findings in the brain such as white-matter hyperintensities. These vascular risk factors are also associated with dementia and lesser forms of cognitive impairment. One hypothesis is that these vascular risk factors lead to disruption of connective networks in the central nervous system that are supported by myelinated white-matter fibers, which in turn lead to deficits in functional signaling between various brain regions...

The involvement of vascular factors in Alzheimer dementia was first appreciated over 100 years ago. Recently, significant advances in our understanding of these brain-vascular relationships have taken place. Vascular cognitive impairment is now recognized as a distinct group of interrelated vascular-based neurological insults that can accumulate and lead to dementia. Importantly, the pathology of vascular cognitive impairment extends far beyond brain destruction wrought by major stroke. Other subtle changes may also arise that contribute to vascular cognitive impairment and dementia, including subclinical stroke, white-matter changes such as hyperintensities and lipohyalinosis, small lacunar infarcts, cerebral hypoperfusion, and compromise of the blood-brain barrier...

Atherosclerosis is the leading cause of death and disabling disease. Whereas risk factors are well known and constitute therapeutic targets, they are not useful for prediction of risk of future myocardial infarction, stroke, or death. Therefore, methods to identify atherosclerosis itself have been tested and found useful (ie, coronary calcium detection by computed tomography scanning, reduction in ankle-brachial index, and ultrasound scanning of the carotid arteries). This review will focus on the latter technique...

Atherosclerotic vascular disease not only remains the leading cause of death in the Western countries, but it has become the most common cause of morbidity and mortality in the low- and middle-income countries as well. Therefore, better understanding of the pathogenesis of atherosclerotic disease and its prevention are of fundamental importance. It is well known that it affects sequentially the aorta followed by coronary, carotid, peripheral, and intracerebral arteries, with some individual variability. The mechanisms of progression are similar in each of the beds, with increasing lipid accumulation in the arterial wall along with macrophages and T-cell infiltration, paucity of smooth-muscle cell proliferation and collagen deposition, and endothelial-cell dysfunction and hypercoagulability playing an important role at the time of acute manifestations of the disease...

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, affecting not only high-income but also low- and middle-income countries. Nearly 80 percent of all estimated cardiovascular disease-related deaths worldwide now occur in low- and middle-income countries, where nearly 30 percent of all deaths are attributable to cardiovascular disease. The health burden of cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases is also accompanied by a significant deleterious economic impact at the level of both national economies and households...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The Meyerhoff Scholars Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County is widely viewed as a national model of a program that enhances the number of underrepresented minority students who pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics PhDs. The current article provides an overview of the program and the institution-wide change process that led to its development, as well as a summary of key outcome and process evaluation research findings. African American Meyerhoff students are 5× more likely than comparison students to pursue a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics PhD...

After a diminishing of its ranks following the post-World War II explosion of growth in medical discoveries, advanced medical technology, and the concomitant specialization of the physician workforce, family medicine is re-establishing itself as a leading medical specialty that has garnered growing interest among recent medical-school graduates. Family physicians provide care for patients of all ages, from newborns to the elderly. In addition to its wide scope of practice, family medicine is characterized by its emphasis on understanding of the whole person, its partnership approach with patients over many years, and its command of medical complexity...

Providers and hospitals have received more than $5 billion from the federal government for meaningfully using electronic health records as of April 2012. Meaningful Use stage 1 makes adoption of the personal health record optional. The proposed Meaningful Use stage 2 regulations make personal health record use mandatory. There is peer-reviewed literature to support a personal health record adoption rate of 10%, which is optional in stage 1 and required in stage 2. The literature also supports the use of secure messaging required in stage 2...

The causes of homelessness are complex and multifactorial and the solutions equally complex. Though homelessness is not a disease process, it is directly linked to poor health outcomes. It is thus incumbent on health care professionals to know the various definitions of homelessness, the ramifications of unstable housing, and the specific living conditions of each homeless patient. These factors needed to be accounted for when designing treatment plans in a way that will increase access to care and promote adherence...

Patients with serious illnesses are living longer and with greater disabilities. Palliative-care interventions have been shown to increase quality of life, lower costs, and improve survival. In order to meet the palliative-care needs of patients, it is crucial for primary-care clinicians to understand how they can provide primary palliative care and when they should refer to palliative-care specialists. By working together, many more patients and families will receive the comprehensive, individualized, coordinated care and support that both primary care and palliative care offers to patients...

There is increasing interest in maintaining health and delaying disability for older adults as this population segment expands. And instead of focusing on a traditional disease-specific approach to health maintenance, there is an ongoing shift to a patient-centered approach, and defining outcomes based on the older adults' goals. In this approach, their goals and preferences are central, and other factors such as their health status and prognosis help determine which goals may be realistic. These subjective goals and objective characteristics are then balanced with the risks, benefits, and harms of established evidence-driven health-maintenance recommendations...