Patients

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women, but many don't recognize the warning signs. They may ignore the symptoms or mistake them for more benign ailments. Dr. Shannon J. Winakur, medical director of the Women's Heart Center at Saint Agnes Hospital, said women should be more aware of heart disease and how to prevent it. How are the warning signs of heart disease different in women? Warning signs of heart disease typically occur with exertion and go away with rest. The classic symptom of heart disease is a dull tightness in the center of the chest, which may or may not radiate to the neck, jaw, left shoulder or left arm. Women can certainly have these symptoms, but they also often describe sharp or burning chest pain.

A teen cancer patient at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center is set to be serenaded later today by Disney star Savannah Outen. According to the hospital, Outen is to fly in Monday and sing to cancer patient Bo Oliver, who's 16. She'll be singing a song she wrote in Bo's honor. The treat for Bo is the work of Music is Medicine's Donate a Song program.  Any profits from the tune called "Brave and True" will go to Johns Hopkins pediatric oncology research. Like Justin Bieber, Outen launched her career on YouTube.

On March 13th you published a letter written by reader Lois Raimondi Munchel titled "Stop the spread of deadly bacteria in nursing homes. " The letter was timely. It should send alarm bells ringing not only through the hallways of our nursing homes but also through our hospitals and our operating rooms. Not too long ago, at the NIH hospital, deadly Klebseilla bacteria resistant to all antibiotics, were found. Fifty percent of patients with this bacterial infection will die. These lethal, resistant bacteria have appeared in hospitals up and down the East Coast.

I read with interest Maryland Medical Society CEO Gene Ransom's commentary on barriers to care created by health insurance companies ("Insurers' 'fail first' policies jeopardize patient health," March 12). As the president and founder of a national patient organization for people who have primary immunodeficiency diseases - lifelong conditions caused by genetic deficiencies of the immune system - I know that our patients are all too familiar with "fail first" policies. Many of these patients do not produce antibodies needed to fight illness.

A Baltimore abortion clinic whose license was suspended last week disputes that a patient suffered cardiac arrest at its facility, as the state contends. The administrator for the clinic, Associates in Ob/Gyn Care LLC on North Calvert Street, said in a letter dated March 8 to state health officials that the patient began having trouble breathing while recovering from an abortion and was taken to a local hospital, where she eventually died. The patient suffered from a fatal heart condition, may have had defective heart valves and was probably in heart failure, the administrator, Melissa Shachnovitz, wrote in the letter, which the clinic provided to The Baltimore Sun. The letter to Health Secretary Joshua M. Sharfstein came in response to the license suspension, which prohibits the clinic from performing surgical abortions.

State health officials have suspended surgical abortion procedures at three clinics, including one in Baltimore where a patient suffered cardiac arrest and later died at a hospital. The physician who performed the abortion at Associates in OB/GYN Care LLC on North Calvert Street wasn't certified in CPR and a defibrillator at the facility did not work, state officials said in a letter Friday to the General Assembly. Although the cardiac arrest was caused by underlying health conditions and not the abortion, investigators found that it raised questions whether doctors at the clinic can handle an abortion that goes wrong.

Absent from the critical debate in Maryland over how to rein in health care spending has been a serious examination of the dangerous and expensive policies that some Maryland health insurers have enacted in the name of cost containment, and their potentially deleterious impact on patient health. In the name of controlling costs, some Maryland health insurers have enacted a set of onerous barriers to care that prevent Maryland patients from accessing timely and effective treatment, and place health insurers squarely in the middle of the physician-patient relationship.

Your article about the dangerous conditions at Spring Grove Hospital was an accurate description of what has been happening in our public psychiatric hospitals ("At mental facility, staffers besieged," March 3). I was a staff psychiatrist at Spring Grove Hospital for 25 years until June 2013, when the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene decided to close the two assisted living units on the hospital grounds. This was an unfortunate decision since those units served as chronic care for many patients who could not get community placements.

Moira Mattingly had only been pregnant for about 24 weeks - still plenty of time, she thought, to pick a name for her daughter. So when she went to the hospital with some discomfort - small pains coming every seven minutes - the news that she was going into labor was alarming. The baby's lungs weren't fully formed, her skin barely so. Mattingly was also confronting sobering statistics: Babies born before 26 weeks, called micropreemies, can easily die and have a high chance of lifelong medical problems like cerebral palsy and blindness.

Federal health officials warned this week that the nation's hospitals and nursing homes are increasingly at risk from deadly new strains of drug-resistant bacteria that can't be treated with even the strongest antibiotics. So far, the infections have been confined to a small number of the sickest patients in hospital wards, but authorities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say there is only a "limited window of opportunity" to halt the spread of these "nightmare bacteria" into the wider population.