Capsules

DES DAUGHTERS

Some 2 million pregnant women had taken DES (diethylstilbestrol) to help prevent miscarriage before the Food and Drug Administration alerted physicians to its dangers in 1971. Doctors suspected that the estrogen drug was causing vaginal and cervical cancer in daughters born to those women, and more recently have also implicated it in genital abnormalities and infertility in sons. Now there is more unsettling news for DES daughters. When they reach childbearing age, they appear to be more vulnerable than others to miscarriage--as well as to stillbirth, premature birth and ectopic pregnancy (in which the fetus grows outside the uterus). Dr. Ann Barnes of Massachusetts General Hospital studied 1,236 women, half of them DES daughters. She reports in the New England Journal of Medicine that the risk of not achieving a full-term birth was 69% higher for DES daughters than for others. Barnes also offers some reassurance: 81% of the DES daughters who became pregnant still achieved at least one full-term live birth (the rate for non-DES women is 95%). Also, she notes, because the study group was small, DES cannot be definitely implicated in the miscarriages.

LIFE AND DEATH BETS

Many a gambler in the gaudy casinos of Las Vegas has staked the last of his cash on a "life or death" bet. But literally? That seems to have been the case at the city's Sunrise Hospital last week, where some overnight nurses and aides apparently placed bets on when terminally ill patients in their ten-bed intensive care unit would die. According to the Las Vegas newspapers, one nurse, known as "Death's Angel," pulled plugs on the life support systems of as many as six patients. Rather than protest her actions, some co-workers apparently treated the deaths as an opportunity for wagering. The bizarre game came to light when another nurse overheard comments in the cafeteria about "Death's Angel." David Brandsness, the hospital's administrator, calls the charges "as serious as any that could be made in the health-care profession."

TEST-TUBE KIDS

Since the nation's first test-tube baby clinic opened at the Norfolk General Hospital in Virginia, some 3,000 women have applied for admission. So far, only 35 have been selected for the treatment (cost: $3,500 to $4,000), in which an egg is removed from a patient's ovary and fertilized in a Petri dish with her husband's sperm, then inserted into the uterus.

Now comes word that as many as half a dozen women at the clinic have been impregnated. Though it is far too early to predict how many of them will carry their babies to full term, Drs. Howard Jones Jr. and Georgeanna Seegar Jones, the husband-and-wife directors of the clinic, have expressed hope for a 50% success rate. Thus the odds seem to favor the birth, late this year, of the first U.S. test-tube baby.

DEATH BY FRIGHT

The 15 victims, age one to 82, died during or soon after assaults with a variety of weapons, including a cane, a coat hanger, a belt, an electric cord and a shoe. Yet the physical injuries they suffered should not have killed them. Then, what did? The disparate group was culled by Pathologists Marilyn Cebelin and Charles Hirsch from a list of 497 assault cases that occurred in Cleveland between 1950 and 1979. After reviewing autopsy and police reports, tissue slides and hospital charts, the doctors report in Human Pathology that eleven of the 15 people had lesions in the heart similar to the ones that develop in experimental animals subjected to great stress. The conclusion: the victims had died of fright.

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