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Osteoarthritis (OA) is a major cause of pain, disability, and social burden in the elderly throughout the world. Although many studies focused on the molecular mechanism of OA, its etiology remains unclear. Therefore, more biomarkers need to be explored to help early diagnosis, clinical outcome measurement, and new therapeutic target development. Our study aimed to retrieve the potential hub genes of osteoarthritis (OA) by weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) and assess their clinical utility for predicting OA. Here, we integrated WGCNA to identify novel OA susceptibility modules and hub genes. In this study, we first selected 477 and 834 DEGs in the GSE1919 and the GSE55235 databases, respectively, from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) website. Genes with -value<0.05 and | logFC | > 1 were included in our analysis. Then, WGCNA was conducted to build a gene co-expression network, which filtered out the most relevant modules and screened out 23 overlapping WGCNA-derived hub genes. Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analyses elucidated that these hub genes were associated with cell adhesion molecules pathway, leukocyte activation, and inflammatory response. In addition, we conducted the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network in 23 hub genes, and the top four upregulated hub genes were sorted out (CD4, SELL, ITGB2, and CD52). Moreover, our nomogram model showed good performance in predicting the risk of OA (C-index = 0.76), and this model proved to be efficient in diagnosis by ROC curves (AUC = 0.789). After that, a single-sample gene set enrichment (ssGSEA) analysis was performed to discover immune cell infiltration in OA. Finally, human primary synoviocytes and immunohistochemistry study of synovial tissues confirmed that those candidate genes were significantly upregulated in the OA groups compared with normal groups. We successfully constructed a co-expression network based on WGCNA and found out that OA-associated susceptibility modules and hub genes, which may provide further insight into the development of pre-symptomatic diagnosis, may contribute to understanding the molecular mechanism study of OA risk genes.

The POINT project aims to provide evidence to optimise chronic pain management, prevent adverse consequences of opioids, and improve chronic pain patients' pain relief, functional capacity, and quality of life. We describe the outline of the project and its work packages. More specifically, we describe a cohort of persons with chronic pain and a cohort of long-term opioid users identified from a national registry linkage.

A 50-year-old man was admitted to our hospital for vomit, nausea, diplopia, and headache resistant to analgesic drugs. Symptoms started the day after his third COVID-19 mRNA vaccine (Moderna) whereas SARS-CoV-2 nasal swab was negative. Pituitary MRI showed recent bleeding in macroadenoma, consistent with pituitary apoplexy. Adverse Drug Reaction was reported to AIFA (Italian Medicines Agency).A stress dexamethasone dose was administered due to the risk of adrenal insufficiency and to reduce oedema. Biochemistry showed secondary hypogonadism; inflammatory markers were elevated as well as white blood cells count, fibrinogen and D-dimer. Pituitary tumour transsphenoidal resection was performed and pathology report was consistent with pituitary adenoma with focal haemorrhage and necrosis; we found immunohistochemical evidence for SARS-CoV-2 proteins next to pituitary capillaries, in the presence of an evident lymphocyte infiltrate.Few cases of pituitary apoplexy after COVID-19 vaccination and infection have been reported. Several hypotheses have been suggested to explain this clinical picture, including cross-reactivity between SARS-CoV-2 and pituitary proteins, COVID-19-associated coagulopathy, infection-driven acutely increased pituitary blood demand, anti-Platelet Factor 4/heparin antibodies development after vaccine administration. Ours is the first case of SARS-CoV-2 evidence in pituitary tissue, suggesting that endothelial infection of pituitary capillaries could be present before vaccination, possibly due to a previous asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Our case underlines that SARS-CoV-2 can associate with apoplexy by penetrating the central nervous system, even in cases of negative nasal swab. Patients with pituitary tumours may develop pituitary apoplexy after exposure to SARS-CoV-2, therefore clinicians should be aware of this risk.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) were applied to speculate the altered structural and functional abnormalities within the hippocampus in classical trigeminal neuralgia (CTN) patients by detecting the alteration of apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC), fractional anisotropy (FA), and regional homogeneity (ReHo). . Multimodal MRI dataset (DTI and fMRI) and clinical indices (pain and neuropsychological scores) were collected in 27 CTN patients and 27 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HC). Two independent-sample -tests were performed to compare the ADC, FA, and ReHo values in hippocampus areas between CTN patients and HC. Correlation analyses were applied between all the DTI and fMRI parameters within the hippocampus and the VAS (visual analog scale), MoCA (Montreal cognitive assessment), and CDR (clinical dementia rating) scores.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most prevalent articular disease, especially in aged population. Caused by multi-factors (e.g., trauma, inflammation, and overloading), OA leads to pain and disability in affected joints, which decreases patients' quality of life and increases social burden. In pathophysiology, OA is mainly characterized by cartilage hypertrophy or defect, subchondral bone sclerosis, and synovitis. The homeostasis of cell-cell communication is disturbed as well in such pro-inflammatory microenvironment, which provides clues for the diagnosis and treatment of OA. MicoRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous non-coding RNAs that regulate various processes post-transcriptional mechanisms. The miR-17-92 cluster is an miRNA polycistron encoded by the host gene called MIR17HG. Mature miRNAs generated from MIR17HG participate in biological activities such as oncogenesis, neurogenesis, and modulation of the immune system. Accumulating evidence also indicates that the expression level of miRNAs in the miR-17-92 cluster is tightly related to the pathological processes of OA, such as chondrocyte apoptosis, extracellular matrix degradation, bone remodeling, and synovitis. In this review, we aim to summarize the roles of the miR-17-92 cluster in the underlying molecular mechanism during the development and progression of OA and shed light on the new avenue of the diagnosis and treatment of OA.

The experience of anxiety is central to the development of chronic pain. Music listening has been previously shown to exert analgesic effects. Here we tested if an active engagement in music making is more beneficial than music listening in terms of anxiety and pain levels during physical activity that is often avoided in patients with chronic pain. We applied a music feedback paradigm that combines music making and sports exercise, and which has been previously shown to enhance mood. We explored this method as an intervention to potentially reduce anxiety in a group of patients with chronic pain (= 24, 20 female and 4 men; age range 34-64, 51.67,  = 6.84) and with various anxiety levels. All participants performed two conditions: one condition, , where exercise equipment was modified with music feedback so that it could be played like musical instruments by groups of three. Second, a where groups of three performed exercise on the same devices but where they listened to the same type of music passively. Participants' levels of anxiety, mood, pain and self-efficacy were assessed with standardized psychological questionnaires before the experiment and after each condition. Results demonstrate that exercise with musical feedback reduced anxiety values in patients with chronic pain significantly as compared to conventional workout with passive music listening. There were no significant overall changes in pain, but patients with greater anxiety levels compared to those with moderate anxiety levels were observed to potentially benefit more from the music feedback intervention in terms of alleviation of pain. Furthermore, it was observed that patients during more strongly perceived motivation through others. The observed diminishing effects of on anxiety have a high clinical relevance, and in a longer term the therapeutic application could help to break the Anxiety Loop of Pain, reducing chronic pain. The intervention method, however, also has immediate benefits to chronic pain rehabilitation, increasing the motivation to work out, and facilitating social bonding.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fphar.2022.923188.].

Trauma- and emotion-focused chronic pain interventions, particularly Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET), show much promise for reducing pain and improving functioning. We developed a novel, single-session, telehealth-delivered EAET class ("Pain, Stress, and Emotions"; PSE) and tested it on adults with chronic pain of mixed etiology.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in children typically results in similar symptoms with other viral respiratory agents including human adenoviruses (HAdVs). Mixed HAdV and SARS-CoV-2 infection (co-infection) in children might result in enhanced or reduced disease severity compared with single infections. The present study aims to investigate the rate of SARS-CoV2 and HAdV infection and also their coinfection and compare the two infections regarding their laboratory and clinical characteristics at hospital admission. A total of 360 combined oropharyngeal and nasopharyngeal swab samples from hospitalized children were examined by real-time PCR for the existence of the SARS-CoV-2 and HAdVs. The symptoms, the clinical characteristics and laboratory findings were retrieved and compared in SARS-CoV-2 and HAdVs positive cases. Of the total 360 suspected COVID-19 hospitalized children, 45 (12.5%) and 19 (5.3%) specimens were PCR-positive for SARS-CoV-2 and HAdV respectively. SARS-CoV-2 and HAdV co-infection was detected in 4 cases (1.1%). Regarding symptoms at hospital admission, fever in SARS-CoV-2 positive group was significantly higher than that in HAdV positive group [34 (85%) vs. 7 (46.7%), p = 0.012]. However, percentages of cases with sore throat, headache, fatigue, lymphadenopathy and conjunctivitis in HAdV positive group were significantly higher than those in SARS-CoV-2 positive group. SARS-CoV-2 and HAdV co-infected children showed mild respiratory symptoms. The present study revealed that SARS-CoV-2 positive children often appear to have a milder clinical course than children with respiratory HAdV infection and children co-infected with SARSCoV-2 and HAdV had less-severe disease on presentation.

Cervicogenic headache (CEH) has long been recognized as a referred pain deriving from pathological changes in the upper cervical nerves. However, previous clinical studies found that anterior lower cervical discectomy for the treatment of cervical myelopathy and/or radiculopathy can also help relieve associated headaches. To date, there is still a lack of large sample and prospective study to investigate the effect of anterior cervical decompression and fusion (ACDF) on CEH associated with cervical spondylosis.