Dermatomyositis: a contemporary review for oral health care providers.

Dermatomyositis (DM) is an autoimmune muscle disorder characterized by skin rashes and progressive muscle weakness. This disease is a subset of the idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM) and affects both children and adults. Increased incidence of malignancy has been observed in adult DM, making early diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring crucial.

Improvement in medical consultation responses with a structured request form.

Physicians often do not provide adequate information regarding patients' medical conditions when presented with consultation requests (CR) generated by dental students and their instructors about the students' patients. We hypothesized that a structured CR form, which requests specific information by providing a checklist and/or closed-ended questions for physicians to answer, would lead to better communication and improved responses. We also hypothesized that providing in-service education to clinical faculty on the conditions that require and don't require CRs would reduce the number of unwarranted CRs sent to physicians.

American Heart Association 2007 guidelines on prevention of infective endocarditis.

The American Heart Association has recently released a new set of guidelines for prevention of infective endocarditis with major changes and clarifications regarding who should receive antibiotic prophylaxis and who does not require it. The new guidelines are based on the current available evidence and deviate greatly from the previous ones. A summary of the changes and the evidence and philosophy behind this statement is presented in this article.