Faculty Bibliography

In February 1996, George Shultz went to visit his old boss, Ronald Reagan, at the former president's home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. He drank tea with Reagan and his wife, Nancy [Reagan], and talked a little politics. In all, he stayed about an hour. Just when the Alzheimer's began can never be known. But though the line between mere forgetfulness and the beginning of Alzheimer's can be fuzzy, a matter of gradation, Reagan's four main White House doctors say they saw no evidence that he had crossed it as president. They saw and spoke with him daily in the White House, they said, and beyond the natural failings of age, never found his memory, reasoning or judgment to be significantly impaired. Reagan 'absolutely' did not 'show any signs of dementia or Alzheimer's,' said Dr. John Hutton, who cared for him from 1984 until the end of his presidency and remains a close family friend. Extensive mental status tests did not indicate evidence of Alzheimer's until 1993, more than four years after Reagan left office, Hutton said

When former President Reagan disclosed in November 1994 that he had Alzheimer's disease, many people could not help suspecting that the illness had begun to rob him of memory while he was in the White House. 'There was never anything that would raise a question about his ability to function as president,' said Dr. Lawrence C. Mohr, one of Reagan's physicians in his second term. 'Ronald Reagan's cognitive function, belief structure, judgment, ability to choose between options, behavior and ability to communicate were totally and completely intact.' Dr. John Hutton, the chief White House physician during Reagan's last two years in office and a close family friend, said he was speaking out with the permission of the former president's wife, Nancy, chiefly to rebut published statements questioning Reagan's mental status in office

In a surprising finding that is likely to intensify the hunt for viruses as causes of cancer, scientists have linked an AIDS-associated virus with a common blood cancer. The virus, Kaposi's sarcoma herpes virus, was discovered in 1994 among individuals who had AIDS and Kaposi's, a cancer that affects the skin and internal organs. In the new study, the virus was linked to multiple myeloma, the second most common blood cancer in this country, after non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The Kaposi's virus was found in all 15 myeloma patients tested but not in 16 patients with other cancers and 10 healthy volunteers, the authors said in a report being published today in the journal Science. The virus was also detected in patients with two related, but less common blood disorders, Waldenstrom's and amyloidosis, Dr. James R. Berenson, a co-author, said in an interview. To their surprise, the scientists found the Kaposi virus only in noncancerous cells and not in the malignant myeloma ones. The Los Angeles team suspects that the Kaposi's sarcoma virus may cause myeloma indirectly by the infected cells chemically stimulating other cells to become malignant

WHEN men are infected with H.I.V. and another sexually transmitted disease, like gonorrhea, their semen contains about eight times as much AIDS virus as is found in semen of men who who do not have dual infections, a new study has found. The findings indicate that control measures used in some countries to battle AIDS are worthwhile and suggest that widespread detection and treatment programs for sexually transmitted diseases could help prevent many new H.I.V. infections, said the study's authors, from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. The findings are relevant for the United States and other developed countries, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is one of a number of Federal agencies that paid for the study along with the World Health Organization. Family Health International conducted the study along with the University of North Carolina researchers

Lawrence K. Altman reviews the book 'Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century' by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles

Dr. [Richard Doll] said he believed that an important factor in the gap was that the male body was bigger and had more cells, providing a greater chance for something in a cell to go wrong. 'Lung cancer mortality in nonsmokers, for example, is about 20 percent higher in males than females, and one can easily account for that by the greater number of cells' in the airways, Dr. Doll said. The data analyzed by Dr. [Eileen Crimmins] are not nearly as bleak as is commonly believed. 'The difference in death rates makes women look less healthy in old age,' Dr. Crimmins said. 'The males have died off before they become disabled.' 'It is not that women have a greater tendency to get health problems,' Dr. Crimmins said, 'but that they live long enough' to fall into the most vulnerable period of life for disabling illness. And, she said, 'they live longer once they have them.'

The New York Blood Center, under pressure from the Food and Drug Administration and facing allegations of improper testing procedures, will close its laboratory in Manhattan that screens for a variety of infectious diseases and hire an independent lab to do the testing, center officials said yesterday. The laboratory will close within 60 to 90 days, but the blood center itself will stay open. Another laboratory, which has yet to be selected, will screen donated blood for evidence of the microbes that cause infections like AIDS, syphilis and hepatitis, said Dr. John W. Adamson, the president of the blood center. It collects and distributes about 80 to 85 percent of the blood products used in the greater New York area. ''Everything is being done to make blood used in transfusions as safe as we can possibly make it,'' Dr. Adamson said in an interview. ''There is no evidence at this time that any unit of blood or blood product has led to infection because of mistesting.''