[Congenital cardiopathies at an internal medicine service].

Study Objective: Description of 32 cases of congenital heart disease in the adulthood, admitted in the First Department of Medicine of Hospital Santa Maria, Lisboa between 1980 and 1989.

Design: Retrospective study.

Setting: Admission from the Emergency Room and Outpatients Clinic to an Internal Medicine Department of a General Hospital.

[The effectiveness of amiodarone seems to depend highly on the pathology underlying the arrhythmia].

Study Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of amiodarone in tachyarrhythmias occurring acutely, in patients with different nosological entities of the heart.

Design: A retrospective study.

Setting: Emergency-room patients and ward-patients, in an Internal Medicine Department of a University Hospital.

[Hyponatremia--new concepts and therapy. Apropos of a clinical case].

The therapeutic approach of hyponatremia is reviewed, and the authors describe their recent experience of a clinical case of a woman with acute hyponatremia. After analysing the main publications of the last years, they conclude that the way of correcting hyponatremia largely depends of its acute or chronic character. Chronic hyponatremia must be corrected with slow rate infusion of sodium chloride (0.