A drowsy breathless man

Assessment of a breathless patient.

The aim of this article is to describe a systematic and comprehensive approach to the assessment of a breathless patient and to discuss the principles of oxygen delivery. After reading this article you should be able to: Describe how to assess the effectiveness of breathing, the work of breathing and the adequacy of ventilation. Discuss the importance of general appearance, medical and social h...

Drowsy Caches

On-chip caches represent a sizable fraction of the total power consumption of microprocessors. Although large caches can significantly improve performance, they have the potential to increase power consumption. As feature sizes shrink, the dominant component of this power loss will be leakage. However, during a fixed period of time the activity in a cache is only centered on a small subset of t...

An 83-year-old man admitted to hospital drowsy, confused, hypotensive and with generalised rigidity.

CASE REPORT An 83 year-old man was admitted to the emergency department hypotensive, drowsy and confused. He had a past history of type II diabetes, peripheral vascular disease, heart failure and atrial fibrillation, although he had been managing to live by himself with minimal support following the death of his wife 10 years ago. His diabetes had been controlled by diet and his medications con...

CASE FOR DIAGNOSIS A breathless female

A 67-yr-old female was admitted with a two week history of dry cough, cold sores and progressive breathlessness. Her exercise tolerance had gradually reduced over 3 yrs from 3 miles to half a mile. Three years previously she was diagnosed as having chronic myeloid leukaemia for which she received a total of 1.3 g busulphan, producing remission for the last 2 yrs. She was an exsmoker with a 40 p...

A breathless accountant who blew up balloons.