Pulmonary Perspectives

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that approximately 1 million persons in the United States are living with HIV and more than 18,000 persons with AIDS die each year. Pulmonary diseases account for a large percentage of HIV-related complications and pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a noninfectious complication of HIV infection (Morris et al. Proc Am Thorac Soc. 2011;8[1]:17). PAH is reported to occur at an increased frequency in HIV-infected individuals compared with uninfected individuals.

A year after the earthquake in Haiti, health-care providers continue to volunteer in an attempt to fill our Caribbean neighbor’s medical void. In recent years, several domestic and international natural disasters have captured the attention of the medical community and the public at large.

At Johns Hopkins Hospital 50 years ago, Kouwenhoven and colleagues synthesized nearly a century of clinical and animal investigation and published the first report of treatment of human cardiac arrest with closed chest massage.

The standard treatment for stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is lobectomy with mediastinal lymph node sampling or dissection. This standard of care was effectively established by the landmark publication from the Lung Cancer Study Group in 1995 demonstrating decreased local recurrence rates and a trend toward improved survival after lobectomy compared with sublobar resections, including anatomic segmentectomies requiring individual pulmonary arterial and bronchial division, as well as nonanatomic pulmonary wedge resections (Ginsberg and Rubinstein. Ann Thorac Surg. 1995;60[3]: 615).

Despite achievements in the reduction of tobacco use in adults, cigarette smoking is a primary contributor to many of the leading causes of death in the United States, such as heart disease, lung cancer, and COPD.