The Internal Medicine Subinternship--Now More Important than Ever: A Joint CDIM-APDIM Position Paper.

For decades, the internal medicine (IM) subinternship has served as a critical interface between undergraduate and graduate medical education. As such, the vast majority of U.S. medical schools offer this rotation to help students prepare for post-graduate training. Historically an experiential rotation, a formal curriculum with specific learning objectives was eventually developed for this course in 2002. Since then, graduate medical education (GME) has changed significantly with the regulation of duty hours, adoption of competency-based education, and development of training milestones and entrustable professional activities. In response to these and many other changes to residency training and medical practice, in 2010, the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM) surveyed its members-with input from the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine (CDIM) Subinternship Task Force-to determine which core skills program directors expected from new medical school graduates. The results of that survey helped to inform a joint CDIM-APDIM committee's decision to re-evaluate the goals of the IM subinternship in an effort to enhance the transition from medical school to residency. This joint committee defined the minimum expectations of what constitutes an IM subinternship rotation, proposed recommended skills for IM subinterns, and discussed challenges and future directions for this crucial course.

Improving outcomes for persons with aphasia in advanced community-based treatment programs.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Studies have yet to document that community-based aphasia treatment programs routinely produce results comparable or superior to published research protocols. We explore this issue here in an outcome study of individuals with aphasia enrolled in 2 community-based, comparably managed and equipped therapy programs, which use a specially designed computer-based tool that is employed therapeutically in adherence to an extensive, detailed, and formally trained patient care algorithm. METHODS: Patients (n=60) were assessed before and after treatment with standardized instruments at both the impairment and the disability levels. Pretreatment and posttreatment means were calculated and compared, with statistical significance of differences established with the use of 1-tailed matched t tests. One-way ANOVAs were used to analyze the comparability of patient performance changes among various subgroups, eg, patients in acute versus chronic stages of aphasia, patients by aphasia diagnostic type at start of care, patients by severity level at start of care, and patients by treatment location. RESULTS: Analysis shows that patients spanned a wide range of aphasia diagnostic types, impairment severity levels at start of care, and times after onset. Patients' mean performance scores improved significantly in response to treatment in all measures assessed at both the impairment level and the functional communication level. Mean overall improvements ranged from 6.6% to 19.8%, with statistical significance ranging from P=0.0006 to P<0.0001. ANOVAs revealed no significant differences between improvements in patients in the acute versus chronic stages of aphasia, between those at different impairment severity levels at start of care, between those treated at different locations, or, at the functional level, between those with different diagnostic types of aphasia at start of care. CONCLUSIONS: Measures of both language impairment and functional communication can be broadly, positively, and significantly influenced by therapy services that are delivered to persons with aphasia in these community-based programs. The significant improvements are shown to be available to individuals with chronic as well as acute aphasia and independent of diagnostic type of aphasia, impairment severity at start of care, or geographic program location.

Intrafamilial heterogeneity in hereditary motor neuron disease.

Although there are varied inheritance patterns in motor neuron disease (MND), the phenotype of MND is reported to be constant within these families, ie, cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or primary lateral sclerosis do not occur in pedigrees with cases of spinal muscular atrophy. We describe four pedigrees whose members diverged in the phenotype of MND expressed. The intrafamilial variation of phenotype suggests a similar pathogenesis for some of the varied types of familial MND and the need for careful inquiry of family history in all patients with MND.

Yersinia enterocolitica endocarditis.

A patient with Yersinia enterocolitica endocarditis was seen with bacteremia, valvular vegetation, new heart murmur, and septic embolism. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of Y enterocolitica infectious endocarditis and is yet another clinical manifestation of disease produced by this organism.

Occult cancer in patients with acute pulmonary embolism.

An association between venous thrombosis and cancer was first suggested by Trousseau, and has been confirmed by multiple postmortem studies. Clinical studies have shown that thrombophlebitis migrans may occur before malignancies become clinically evident, and therefore serves as a clue to occult cancer. A relation between occult cancer and the commoner deep venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolism has not been established. We ascertained the incidence of cancer before and after pulmonary embolism was diagnosed by pulmonary angiography in 128 patients. The incidence of cancer before pulmonary embolism (12%) was essentially the same as that in a comparison group of patients without pulmonary embolism (10%). In the 2 years after pulmonary angiography, however, cancer was diagnosed in 13 patients with pulmonary embolism in contrast to no patients in the comparison group (p less than 0.001). The most frequent cancers involved the lung, gastrointestinal tract, breast, and uterus. The malignancies were nearly always occult when pulmonary embolism occurred. These findings indicate that pulmonary embolism with or without overt deep venous thrombosis should alert the clinician to consider occult cancer.