Impact of gender-based career obstacles on the working status of women physicians in Japan.

Research has shown that women physicians work fewer hours and are more likely to become inactive professionally and to switch to part-time labor, compared with their male counterparts. The published literature suggests that a gender disparity still exists in medicine which may decrease work motivation among women physicians. The authors investigated whether the experience and the perception of gender-based career obstacles among women physicians in Japan are associated with their working status (i.

Effectiveness of add-on low-dose diuretics in combination therapy for hypertension: losartan/hydrochlorothiazide vs. candesartan/amlodipine.

In guidelines, a combination therapy of two or more antihypertensives is recommended for treatment of hypertension where monotherapy is ineffective. Although diuretics or calcium channel blockers are commonly used as add-ons to angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB), the most effective and safe combination has not been established. In this randomized 4-month study, the efficacy and safety were compared between an ARB/diuretics (losartan/hydrochlorothiazide [HCTZ]) combination and the most prescribed combination, ARB/calcium channel blocker (candesartan/amlodipine) in hypertensive patients for whom 8 mg/day of candesartan proved ineffective.

Two antiprothrombin antibodies against prothrombin and prothrombin-phosphatidyl serine show partial but not total identity.

Recently, an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) using prothrombin (PT) as the antigen has become a widely used test. Two ELISA methods for the detection of antiprothrombin antibody have been used extensively: one method employs PT as an antigen (aPT), and the other employs PT and phosphatidyl serine (aPT/PS) as antigens along with Ca. However, the results obtained by the two methods are not necessarily consistent with each other even using the same samples, suggesting the possibility that aPT and aPT/PS are different antibodies.