A prospective study of advance directives for life-sustaining care.

Background: The use of advance directives is recommended so that people can determine the medical care they will receive when they are no longer competent, but the effectiveness of such directives is not clear.

Methods: In a prospective study conducted over a two-year period, 126 competent residents of a nursing home and 49 family members of incompetent patients were interviewed to determine their preferences with respect to hospitalization, intensive care, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, artificial ventilation, surgery, and tube feeding in the event of critical illness, terminal illness, or permanent unconsciousness. Advance directives, consisting of signed statements of treatment preferences, were placed in the medical record to assist in care in the nursing home and to be forwarded to the hospital if necessary.

Rebound hyperthermia follows ethanol-induced hypothermia in rats.

We have recently described a telemetry/microcomputer system to monitor core temperatures in rats. We implant a miniature transmitter (Mini-mitter) into the peritoneal cavity of the rat, allowing us to obtain temperatures around the clock without handling the animals or disturbing the light-dark cycle. In the present study we describe the temperature effects of ethanol doses ranging from 2 to 6 g/kg.

Automated remote temperature measurement in small animals using a telemetry/microcomputer interface.

Temperatures can be obtained from small animals by implanting commercially available radio-telemetry probes (Mini-Mitters), thereby avoiding handling-induced artifacts. We have developed an inexpensive microcomputer interface to automatically collect data from Mini-Mitters. The interface hardware detects the signal and converts it to a TTL pulse train compatible with the Commodore PET microcomputer.