Curb Your Enthusiasm

Bioethics and human rights: curb your enthusiasm.

as they put it, Annas simply ‘‘hasmisunderstood andmisrepresented our positions on several key points.’’ Speaking as editors, such provocative phrases from both sides make for ‘‘Great Debate’’ fodder, indeed. We can only hope that, as readers, you concur. This introduction does little to explain the arguments produced herein, and, undoubtedly, the end of this debate has not settled the problems...

Formulas for fixing serum sodium: curb your enthusiasm

A variety of formulas have been proposed to predict changes in serum sodium concentration. All are based on an experiment done over 50 years ago by Edelman, who derived a formula relating the plasma sodium concentration to isotopically measured body sodium, potassium, and water. Some of these formulas fail because they do not include urinary losses of electrolytes and water. Even those that inc...

Curb Your Inflammation

The body’s inflammatory response is crucial for combating invading pathogens, but sometimes this response spins out of control, leading to chronic disease or even death. Several recent studies now uncover transcriptional mechanisms that help to hold inflammation in check. A rather extreme example of inflammatory overkill is sepsis, in which the body mounts an excessive and often deadly response...

Lumacaftor/ivacaftor for patients homozygous for Phe508del-CFTR: should we curb our enthusiasm?

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a success story of modern medicine, with advances in care transforming a disease previously associated with early childhood death into a chronic condition with a predicted median survival of nearly 50 years for patients born in this current decade. This has been achieved through a model of multidisciplinary care with the successive advent of supportive therapies that tac...

Enthusiasm: it's catching.