“Il flauto magico” still works: Mozart’s secret of ventilation

“Il flauto magico” still works: Mozart’s secret of ventilation

BACKGROUND Synchronisation/coupling between respiratory patterns and musical structure. METHODS Healthy professional musicians and members of the audience were studied during a performance of W.A. Mozart's Piano Concerto KV 449. Electrocardiogram (ECG)/Heart Rate Variability (HRV) data recording (Schiller: Medilog®AR12, ECG-channels: 3, sampling rate: 4096 Hz, 16 Bit) was carried out and a si...

Hypertension after kidney transplantation: still a SECRET?

With kidney transplantation coming of age, our major focus today is directed towards improving long-term graft survival and cardiovascular outcome. Despite the high incidence of hypertension in transplanted patients and the well-known deleterious effects on end organs, it is still a major question which blood pressure-lowering drugs are optimal to achieve improved outcome. Since many years, blo...

Magico-religious mercury exposure.

Mark Wheeler's Focus article, "Measuring Mercury" (1), which appeared in the August 1996 issue of EHP, contained a serious omission. Wheeler concentrated on methyl mercury and, to a lesser extent, elemental mercury in dental amalgams. He failed to mention the relatively recently described but extremely significant exposures to elemental mercury in ethnically Hispanic and Caribbean homes, conseq...

Is noninvasive ventilation still underused by physicians?

Sigmoidoscopy screening probably works, but how well is still unknown.

The most persuasive scientific evidence for the benefit of a cancer screening test comes from a randomized controlled clinical trial (RCT) where the endpoint is a reduction in mortality from (or incidence of) the disease of interest. There have been three RCTs of a fecal occult blood test (Hemoccult; Beckman Coulter, Palo Alto, CA) for early detection of colorectal cancer involving more than 25...