{"id":316,"date":"2007-08-18T17:19:43","date_gmt":"2007-08-18T16:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/resource.bmj.com\/bmj\/2007\/08\/18\/nejm-16-aug-2007-vol-357\/"},"modified":"2007-08-18T17:19:43","modified_gmt":"2007-08-18T16:19:43","slug":"nejm-16-aug-2007-vol-357","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2007\/08\/18\/nejm-16-aug-2007-vol-357\/","title":{"rendered":"NEJM  16 Aug 2007  Vol 357"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The initials RLS are forever associated with the great Scottish teller of tales who died on Samoa at the age of 44. He certainly had restless legs, and rarely remained in one place for very long;<!--more--> and his nocturnal wakefulness brings us some of the most haunting passages in <em>Travels with a Donkey<\/em>. Whether he kicked his wife Fanny in his sleep, we are not (so far as I know) told, but she certainly deserved it. Nor do we know whether he carried the common variant of an intron of<em> BTBD9<\/em> on chromosome 6p21.2 which <a href=\"http:\/\/content.nejm.org\/cgi\/content\/abstract\/357\/7\/639\">this study <\/a>asserts to be associated with susceptibility to periodic limb movements in sleep. But hey, let\u2019s pick a dark foggy night in Samoa, climb up to his grave, and take a tissue sample. He would rather like that.<\/p>\n<p>Opponents of abortion are always trying to find evidence that it does physical harm to women so that they won\u2019t enter into mortal sin by having such procedures. But <a href=\"http:\/\/content.nejm.org\/cgi\/content\/abstract\/357\/7\/648\">this study<\/a> of subsequent pregnancies after medical abortion in Denmark shows no increased risk of ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage or preterm birth.<\/p>\n<p>If you have <a href=\"http:\/\/content.nejm.org\/cgi\/content\/abstract\/357\/7\/664\">extensive small-cell lung cancer<\/a>, you will die, probably within six months. You may wish to spend one or more of these months receiving chemotherapy and then one or more receiving prophylactic cranial irradiation, which will raise your mean survival from 5.4 months to 6.7 months, and your chance of reaching a year from 13% to 27%. The investigators suggest that it should therefore \u201cbe part of standard care for all patients with small-cell lung cancer who have a response to initial chemotherapy.\u201d Care? For me, that would be an Italian hillside and a good choice of music.<\/p>\n<p>Treating psoriasis is tiresome; as this<a href=\"http:\/\/content.nejm.org\/cgi\/content\/extract\/357\/7\/682\"> review of psoralen and ultraviolet A light therapy<\/a> points out, most patients find their treatment unsatisfactory. They can\u2019t forget their disease, especially when they take their clothes off; and doctors can\u2019t explain it or do more than control it. Still, old-fashioned PUVA does work, a bit better in most patients than narrow-band UVB. If you want to understand how, there is some classic artwork on p.685 featuring colour combinations you may wish to avoid in your living room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The initials RLS are forever associated with the great Scottish teller of tales who died on Samoa at the age of 44. He certainly had restless legs, and rarely remained [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2007\/08\/18\/nejm-16-aug-2007-vol-357\/\">More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-richard-lehmans-weekly-review-of-medical-journals"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>NEJM 16 Aug 2007 Vol 357 - The BMJ<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2007\/08\/18\/nejm-16-aug-2007-vol-357\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"NEJM 16 Aug 2007 Vol 357 - The BMJ\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The initials RLS are forever associated with the great Scottish teller of tales who died on Samoa at the age of 44. 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