Commentary by Robert Perlman on a BBS article by Pepper and Nettle Socioeconomic disparities in health are persistent, complex, and seemingly intractable problems. Disparities in access to health care play a role but can’t be a major cause of health disparities, since...
Spermatogonial stem cells replicate and produce sperm throughout adult life, while oocyte precursors complete all of their mitotic cell divisions during fetal development and primary oocytes are arrested in meiosis at birth. Because many more rounds of cell division...
Pain has long been recognized as one of the cardinal symptoms of myocardial ischemia and myocardial infarction. The adaptive significance of this pain has been unclear. If anything, pain was thought to motivate people to lie down and rest, which would reduce oxygen...
Infections by multiple strains of the same pathogen—coinfections or superinfections—raise interesting and challenging problems. From the perspective of the pathogen, superinfection is a trade-off: superinfecting strains will compete with resident strains for host...
In 1889, Stephen Paget proposed the “seed and soil” hypothesis for the growth of cancer metastases. Paget was struck by the preferential localization of breast cancer metastases in bone and liver, and suggested that the spread of metastatic cancers depended upon the...
