Editorial: Randomized clinical trials and neurosurgery

Editorial: Personalized Medicine and Neurosurgery

The Precision Medicine Initiative, which was instituted by President Barack Obama on January 20, 2015, highlighted the importance that advances in genomics and related "-omic " approaches have made to science and medicine, and it set the stage for their federally funded and mandated integration into the delivery of health care. Whether these advances comprise large-scale approaches, such as The...

Editorial Biomarkers in Clinical Trials

In contemporary cardiovascular practice, the most common and useful applications of biomarkers focus on disease diagnosis, with troponins for myocardial infarction and natriuretic peptides for heart failure representing the most notable examples. Identification of additional cardiovascular diagnostic markers has proved challenging, however, because high quality studies for diagnostic indication...

EDITORIAL Randomized trials in coronary bypass surgery

CORONARY artery bypass grafting is an effective treatment for increasing myocardial blood flow in selected patients with coronary artery disease. After this procedure, symptoms improve, coronary blood flow to the affected area is increased, and exercise tolerance is enhanced.1 In patients who have received maximal drug therapy and yet remain intolerably symptomatic, bypass surgery clearly adds ...

Editorial Neurosurgery for psychiatric disorders

Daring must be an inborn trait. Egas Moniz, the neurolo-gist who extrapolated from the abolition of experimental neurosis in two chimpanzees to the invention of a procedure to ablate pathways of the frontal lobes in mentally ill human beings, had already developed angiog-raphy and spent time in jail for opposition to the Portugese monarchy 1. Such a man could write, in recording the results in ...

Editorial Neurosurgery for psychiatric disorders