Faculty Bibliography

In lithotripsy treatments, a patient sits in a bath positioned so that the kidney stone is at the focal point of a shock wave generator. A spinal anesthetic is injected to numb the patient, who then receives about a thousand small shocks. The shock waves pulverize the stones, which are then passed in the urine. In the United States, the device sped through trials with 2,500 patients and won Food and Drug Administration approval in 1984. Now lithotripsy is the primary treatment for kidney stones, with more than 100,000 procedures done in this country each year. The concern is that the shock waves generated in lithotripsy may damage the kidneys. And doctors have long known that kidney damage can lead to high blood pressure, although they have an incomplete understanding of how

The spread and effects of Lyme disease, which is transmitted by ticks or other insects, is discussed. The treatment and how to prevent the disease are also presented

''We must not be so distracted by the slam-bang effects of lithotripsy that we fail to pay sufficient attention to the quieter, long-term side effects,'' a team of researchers wrote last year in The American Journal of Roentgenology. The team, from Massachusetts General Hospital, was led by Dr. Albert G. Mulley Jr. Some answers about hypertension are expected to come from an F.D.A.-mandated study of 1,000 patients. The study is sponsored by lithotripter manufacturers through the National Electrical Manufacturers Association in Washington. ''Why in the world didn't we think about this earlier, because it is such an obvious possibility,'' said Dr. Phillip M. Hall, a specialist in hypertension at the Cleveland Clinic. ''Never did it occur to me to look at this problem, and, in retrospect, it sounds really silly that we didn't study this earlier,'' Dr. [E. Darracott Vaughan Jr.] said. ''If we did, we could have defused the whole thing way back.''

''There, I would point some fingers,'' he said. ''Institutions have to take the primary role in monitoring the environment and culture of science. ''In a system as large as ours, we always have a few people who are cavalier, careless and insensitive at times to animal issues,'' Dr. [James B. Wyngaarden] said. ''We have got to be scrupulously careful.'' Although substantial investments have been made for AIDS, Alzheimer's disease and the research to map the human genome, ''for the most part, everything else is just on hold and there is so much more worth doing,'' Dr. Wyngaarden said

Five thousand reports at the fifth international conference on AIDS in Montreal Canada have focused on how AIDS has become a chronic disease that partly responds to some treatments, but for which it will take years to develop an effective cure or vaccine. Many experts spoke of managing AIDS like cancer with various new and existing drugs

So far, he said, he has used the experimental test on about 100 patients with AIDS or carrying the AIDS virus with encouraging results. In the test, white cells, or lymphocytes, are separated from a sample of a patient's blood, added to a solution in the laboratory and kept in test tubes for three days. Then the numbers of dead and dying lymphocytes are counted. About 10 percent of the cells from healthy people who are not infected with the AIDS virus die in the period, but the figure can reach 60 percent among those ill with AIDS

During the fifth international meeting on AIDS held in Montreal, Dr Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris has reported that a simple blood test he had developed may determine the severity of infection by the AIDS virus

Dr Jonas Salk, the inventor of a polio vaccine, announced that a recent vaccine he has developed might eventually help prevent people already infected with the AIDS virus from developing the disease

Needle and syringe exchange programs for intravenous drug users in three cities have reduced needle-sharing and the risk of transmitting the AIDS virus, according to a study done on the programs enacted in Tacoma WA, Amsterdam and London

The study of 5,287 white Seventh-day Adventists in California found that women whose menopause had occurred before the age of 40 showed almost twice the risk of dying in the six years of the study than did women of similar ages whose menopause came at the ages of 50 to 54. The researchers used women who underwent menopause between 50 and 55 as their point of comparison. Of the 105 who underwent menopause between age 40 and 44, 105, or 20 per cent, died. Of the 1,532 who underwent menopause from the age of 45 to 49, 230 or 15 per cent died. Of the 2,314 who underwent menopause from the age of 50 to 54, 300, or just under 13 per cent died. Of the 778 women who underwent menopause at 55 or older, 103, or slightly more than 13 per cent, died. Of the women answering the questionnaire, 10,198 were from 55 to 100 years old, and 5,287, or 52 per cent, said they had gone through a natural menopause. One per cent had not experienced menopause. Thirty-one per cent had had a surgical menopause