Clinical medicine (London, England)
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Managing acute intracerebral haemorrhage is a challenging task for physicians. Evidence shows that outcome can be improved with admission to an acute stroke unit and active care, including urgent reversal of anticoagulant effects and, potentially, intensive blood pressure reduction. Nevertheless, many management issues remain controversial, including the use of haemostatic therapy, selection of patients for neurosurgery and neurocritical care, the extent of investigations for underlying causes and the benefit versus risk of restarting antithrombotic therapy after an episode of intracerebral haemorrhage.
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Some patients with gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GORD) experience symptoms despite proton pump inhibitor (PPI) treatment. In the early years of their availability, these drugs were thought to be a highly effective treatment for GORD and realisation that symptom relief was often incomplete came as a disappointment. This review considers the evolution of thinking with the aid of the Gartner hype cycle - a graphical depiction of the process of innovation, evolution and adoption of new technologies. Acknowledging that over-simplistic concepts of GORD have been largely responsible for inflated expectations of PPI therapy is an important step forward in establishing how patients with persistent symptoms, despite PPIs, should be assessed and treated.
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We describe the case of a 45-year-old woman presenting with troponin positive cardiac-sounding chest pain. An initial emergency angiogram demonstrated two vessel coronary disease, including a distal right coronary artery occlusion. ⋯ After consideration of other multisystem symptoms and raised eosinophil count, the patient was diagnosed with eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (formerly known as Churg-Strauss syndrome) presenting with coronary arteritis. This case should remind physicians to be vigilant and to consider non-atherosclerotic causes of acute coronary syndrome presentation, which should not always result in a stent.
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Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM; approximately 5% of pregnancies) represents the most important risk factor for development of later-onset diabetes mellitus. We examined concordance between GDM diagnosis defined using the original 1999 World Health Organization (WHO) criteria and the more recent 2013 WHO criteria and 2015 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) criteria. ⋯ Our results showed that a significant number of additional cases are detected using the more recent NICE and WHO criteria than the original 1999 WHO criteria, but these additional cases represent an intermediate group with 'moderate' dysglycaemia (abnormal blood glucose levels). Our results also show that use of these newer criteria misses a similar group of intermediate cases that were defined as GDM by the 1999 WHO criteria and that glycated haemoglobin in isolation is unlikely to replace the oral glucose tolerance test in GDM diagnosis.