BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGY Many women use a variety of contraceptive methods during their reproductive lives. Investigating this exposure is one of the most frequently performed epidemiological investigations. Accurate recall of methods used, as well as validating this information, can be difficult. A pilot study compared recalled contraceptive use over 5 years with that documented in the case ...

OBJECTIVE To estimate differences in continuation of oral contraceptive pills (OCPs) between U.S. resident women obtaining pills in U.S. family planning clinics compared with over-the-counter in Mexican pharmacies. METHODS In El Paso, Texas, we recruited 514 OCP users who obtained pills over the counter from a Mexican pharmacy and 532 who obtained OCPs by prescription from a family planning c...

OBJECTIVES Single-pill combination therapy (amlodipine/atorvastatin) might be more effective than double-pill therapy (amlodipine+atorvastatin) in patients with diabetes and concomitant hypertension requiring statin therapy. We compared the cost-effectiveness of a single-pill with that of double-pill for control of low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) levels, with the ultimate goal of ca...

BACKGROUND Long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC) have become more commonly promoted in the UK, but most young women still rely on the contraceptive pill. Here, we describe young women's accounts of hormonal contraceptive use to explore why this might be the case. METHODS In-depth interviews with twenty 20-year-old women from eastern Scotland in the UK. RESULTS All but one woman repor...

based on epidemiologic data, women who take oral contraceptives seem to have an increased risk of developing thromboembollic disease. the thrombotic effects of oral contraceptive (oc) are probably mediated, at least partly through their effects on the coagulation system. plasma levels of several clotting factors have been shown to be elevated in oc users, and this increase is graduated accordin...

A 26-year-old male presented with symptoms of acute esophageal obstruction immediately after swallowing an 800-mg ibuprofen tablet. Multiple attempts to extract the pill with a variety of traditional endoscopic retrieval devices were unsuccessful. We successfully destroyed the pill using a threaded-tip biliary stent retrieval device to drill a hole in the center of the pill, which allowed us to...

Recent studies on Neisseria gonorrhoeae have yielded suggestions that the surfaces of these organisms play vital roles as pathogenetic determiners in gonococcal infections. Virulence has been correlated with specific gonococcal colony forms by Kellogg et al. (1, 2). This finding was established through inoculation of human volunteers with organisms derived from the various colony types that cou...