By Jessie Yu

Faculty Peer Reviewed

A healthy 21-year-old female college student presents to clinic after one day of dysuria and increased frequency. You diagnose her with a recurrent urinary tract infection (UTI), and as you hand her a prescription for empiric antibiotic treatment, she asks you if drinking cranberry juice will prevent these in the future…

Drinking cranberry juice to prevent urinary tract infections (UTIs) has been a traditional folk remedy for hundreds of years. Stroll into any New York City pharmacy and…

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Primecuts will return to action next week 10/24/11. Seems like the fall foliage kept our computers at bay this weekend…enjoy the week.

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By Aviva Regev

Faculty Peer Reviewed

As we start feeling the change in season this week in New York – cooler weather, earlier sunsets, a break from that cloying humidity – it’s easy to see the city in a new light.  This week in the journals, we take a look at common diseases from a fresh perspective.  

Putting an HIV patient with a low CD4 count on an immunosuppressive drug might seem like the last thing you’d want to do.  As it turns…

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By David Altszuler, Class of 2012

Faculty Peer Reviewed

An empiric association between occult malignancy and thrombophlebitis has been recognized since Trousseau first reported the syndrome in 1865.  The mechanism by which cancer predisposes to thrombophilia has not been fully elucidated; however, it is now clear that this is a symbiotic relationship.  The second leading cause of death in hospitalized cancer patients (and a leading cause of death in ambulatory cancer patients) is venous thromboembolism.  There are algorithms to identify cancer patients at high risk…

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By: Aviva Regev

Mr. S is a 68-year old man with longstanding COPD and a 40-pack-year smoking history.  He presents to clinic with three days of increasing shortness of breath, and complains that he has been coughing up “more junk” than usual.  As I watch him spit a wad of chartreuse sputum into his tissue, I reach for the prescription pad and tell him he’ll need a week of antibiotics.  He wants to know why he can’t just go up on his inhaled medications instead…

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By Adelaide Hearst, MD

Faculty Peer Reviewed

Diabetes is a nationwide epidemic in the United States, affecting 23.6 million people, over 7% of the population. But all diabetics may not be created equal. In the US, Asians are 1.6 times more likely that non-Hispanic whites to have diabetes, even after adjusting for body-mass index (BMI), age, and sex. Asians have high rates of type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease, and increased risk for metabolic syndrome compared to non-Hispanic whites.  Spend a day at…

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Primecuts will be taking a much needed holiday and will return to action 9/6/11.  Not to worry though, new posts will still be arriving these next few weeks.  This is the perfect opportunity to catch up on our archives of Primecuts and all our other articles. Search by category with the toolbar above and at the right of this post. As always, send us any comments/feedback to clinicalcorrelations@gmail.com.  Have a great end of the summer.

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By Bora Toklu, MD

Faculty Peer Review

My friend was sobbing when she called me on the weekend of July 4th. She had become upset when told by a physician that a possible cause of her chronic cough might be lung cancer. Given that my friend is a 30 year-old non-smoker with no family history of cancer, her actual risk of lung cancer is very small. In order to calm her down I found myself explaining the “July effect”. July 1st signals the beginning of…

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By Anjali Nigalaye, MD

Faculty Peer Reviewed

In keeping with the trend of current times, this week’s Primecuts begins and ends with Washington.  Love it or hate it, the political atmosphere is tense and the issues of debate are all-pervasive, no less in the business of our daily lives as health care professionals.  Paying credence to this fact is new data published this week in Health Affairs that estimates government spending to account for about half of annual health dollars spent by the year…

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By Vicky Jones, MD

Faculty Peer Reviewed 

Hello and welcome to another edition of primecuts! This week we’ll explore studies from the that look at breast cancer screening guidelines, treatment strategies for secondary prevention of myocardial infarction, treatment strategies for alzeimers disease, and the affects of war on health.

 In a new practice bulletin published this week, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) took another look at the same studies used by the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) for breast cancer…

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By Joanna Becker

Faculty Peer Reviewed

 Patients who are placed on long-term warfarin (Coumadin) therapy are sent home with a lengthy list of restrictions to minimize variations in warfarin efficacy. The agents that can alter warfarin levels can be divided into 2 categories: (1) those that interact with cytochrome P450, which metabolizes warfarin and (2) those that alter phytonadione (vitamin K) levels.  The majority of inter- and intra-individual warfarin dose variability is attributable to the agents in category 1 above, which include everything from antibiotics,…

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