Pediatric Collagenous Gastroenterocolitis Successfully Treated with Methotrexate.

A two-and-one-half-year-old previously healthy female presented with a ten-week history of watery diarrhea, nonbilious and nonbloody emesis, and low-grade fevers. She was found to have severe hypoalbuminemia and hypogammaglobulinemia. Her symptoms persisted, and she became dependent on parenteral nutrition.

Resource allocation in neonatal and medical ICUs. Epidemiology and rationing at the extremes of life.

This study compared resource allocation to patients who eventually die in neonatal ICUs (NICUs) and adult medical ICUs (MICUs). It was performed via retrospective, chart review study at ICUs at the University of Chicago-an inner city, tertiary care, academic medical center. All patients were admitted to the neonatal, general medical, or coronary ICU during 1 calendar yr.

Distributive justice across generations. Epidemiology of ICU care for the very young and the very old.

Babies of extremely low birthweight and elderly adults both require expensive and scarce resources, and both have a relatively poor prognosis for survival if they require intensive care. Thus, proposals for rationing often target one or both of these groups. We suspected that although mortality rates might be higher in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) than in the adult intensive care unit (ICU), NICU care might nevertheless be more cost effective, where cost efficiency is measured along the dimension of resources targeted to survivors.