The perception of health care risk: patients, health care staff and society.

Introduction: The Nuovo Zingarelli, dictionary of the Italian language, defines risk as "the possibility of harmful or negative consequences following not always predictable circumstances". A statistical-epidemiological type of definition is far removed from the social and psychological conception that the population attributes to the risk of harm, which is related to interior processes and emotional reactions. Information on risks interacts with knowledge, personal values and beliefs to produce a subjective expression that is perception.

[Bile dynamics in patients with postcholecystectomy syndrome].

Background: Twenty-three cholecystectomized patients, asymptomatic or with recurrent biliary pain, were studied.

Methods: Six patients were asymptomatic without organic complications of the biliary tree and negative cholestasis laboratory tests; six were symptomatic with gallstones or stenosis of the main biliary tree; eleven patients were symptomatic without organic diseases. All the groups of patients were matched for age and sex.

[Thyroid-intestinal motility interactions summary].

Thyroid diseases may be related to gastrointestinal motility symptoms. Such symptoms can vary in degree and, sometimes, are the only clue of a thyroid disease or, at least, the first. The mechanism by which the thyroid hormones can influence gastrointestinal motility, even if not still completely elucidated, can be found in a synergism between a direct effect of the thyronins and an indirect effect mediated by cathecolamines on the muscle cell receptors.

[Esophageal transit and esophageal motility disorders in patients with nontoxic goiter and recurrent dysphagia].

Esophageal motor function was studied in 14 patients affected with diffuse and (multi)nodular nontoxic goiter, with dysphagia and neck discomfort, and in 10 age-matched controls without thyroid and/or gastroesophageal diseases. Esophageal manometry was employed to evaluate upper esophageal sphincter pressure (UESP) and lower esophageal sphincter pressure (LESP), amplitude, duration and propagation velocity of peristaltic contractions and the presence of simultaneous deglutitive pressure waves. Esophageal transit was evaluated by radioisotopical method, at different times, in proximal, middle and distal esophagus.

[Effects of intravenous administration of clarithromycin on plasma levels of gastrin and group I pepsinogen].

Erythromycin and some of its derivatives have prokinetic gastrointestinal properties. In addition, erythromycin has been shown to stimulate isolated chief cells of the gastric mucosa, and to activate pepsin secretion. The above study was aimed at ascertaining in a group of dyspeptic patients whether clarithromycin, a structural analogue of erythromycin, is apt to modify certain functional parameters of gastric secretion, above all the patterns of gastrin and PG-I secretion.