CHEST Physician

Prolonged thromboprophylaxis with 30 days of oral apixaban in initially hospitalized, acutely medically ill patients proved no more effective and caused more major bleeding than 6-14 days of enoxaparin in a major randomized clinical trial.

The long-awaited “Berlin Heart,” a ventricular assist device for infants and children with heart failure, has been approved in the United States. The mechanical pulsatile cardiac assist device, which comes in different sizes to fit children from newborns to teenagers, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Dec. 16.

As with many other specialties, sleep medicine has been shifting toward helping clinicians obtain a better understanding of gender-specific issues in disorders and disturbances.

Mediastinal masses are relatively rare and encompass a wide variety of diseases from the purely benign to the extremely malignant.

Not long ago, patients older than 65 years were rarely considered candidates for lung transplantation. But that’s not quite true anymore.

To save a patient in septic shock, think SAVE.

The jury is still out on whether patients with acute lung injury and adult respiratory distress syndrome derive any benefit from the use of corticosteroids, Dr. Stephen M. Pastores, FCCP, said at CHEST 2011, the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.

Sleep disturbances are common during the teenage years. The two most common sleep problems noted are behaviorally induced insufficient sleep and delayed sleep phase.

Patients with rheumatoid arthritis have a high risk of concomitant chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to data from two studies.

Initial endosonographic assessment of mediastinal lymph node metastases in patients with resectable non–small cell lung cancer surpassed initial surgical staging not just in clinical outcomes but also with lower cost and better quality of life in a controlled, head-to-head comparison of the two approaches.

Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a serious disease that arises from several different etiologies: pulmonary vascular, lung, or cardiac diseases.

One such indelible footprint has been left in the lives of many in the pulmonary/critical care community by Dr. Dorothy A. White, FCCP. She was a gifted clinician, a clear thinker, and a prolific writer who worked at Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center in New York.