Accepted

Temporomandibular joint (TMJ) osteoarthritis is a degenerative disease, characterized by gradual cartilage degradation, bone remodeling, synovitis, and chronic pain. Due to the limited self-healing capacity in condylar cartilage, traditional clinical therapy have limited symptom-modifying and structure-modifying effects to restore impaired cartilage as well as other TMJ tissues. In last years, stem cell-based therapy has collected much attention as a possible approach toward tissue repair and regeneration. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), derived from the bone marrow, synovium, and even umbilical cord, play a role as seed cells for the cartilage regeneration of TMJ. MSCs possess multilineage differentiation potential, including chondrogenic differentiation as well as osteogenic differentiation. In addition, the modulations of MSCs exert anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory effects under aberrant conditions. Furthermore, MSCs combined with appropriate scaffolds can form cartilaginous or even osseous compartments to repair damaged tissue and impaired function of TMJ. In this review, we will describe the potential sources of MSCs and novel approaches for the cartilage regeneration of TMJ, particularly focusing on the MSC-based therapy and tissue engineering.

Given time constraints, poorly organized information, and complex patients, primary care providers (PCPs) can benefit from clinical decision support (CDS) tools that aggregate and synthesize problem-specific patient information. First, this article describes the design and functionality of a CDS tool for chronic noncancer pain in primary care. Second, we report on the retrospective analysis of real-world usage of the tool in the context of a pragmatic trial.

To provide an overview of the current available literature on peripheral nerve blocks for the management of migraine and other headache disorders in adults.

Clinical production pressure is a significant problem for faculty of anesthesiology departments who seek to remain involved in research. Lack of protected time to dedicate to research and insufficient external funding add to this long-standing issue. Recent trends in funding to the departments of anesthesiology and their academic output validate these concerns. A 2022 study examining National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant recipients associated with anesthesiology departments across 10 years (2011-2020) outlines total awarded funds at $1,676,482,440, with most of the funds awarded to only 10 departments in the United States. Of note, the total 1-year NIH funding in 2021 for academic internal medicine departments was 3 times higher than the 10-year funding of anesthesiology departments. Additionally, American Board of Anesthesiology (ABA) diplomats represent a minority (37%) of the anesthesiology researchers obtaining grant funding, with a small number of faculty members receiving a prevalence of monies. Overall, the number of publications per academic anesthesiologist across the United States remains modest as does the impact of the scholarly work. Improving environments in which academic anesthesiologists thrive may be paramount to successful academic productivity. In fact, adding to the lack of academic time is the limited bandwidth of senior academic physicians to mentor and support aspiring physician scientists. Given then the challenges for individual departments and notable successes of specialty-specific collaborative efforts (eg, Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research [FAER]), additional pooled-resource approaches may be necessary to successfully support and develop clinician scientists. It is in this spirit that the leadership of Anesthesia & Analgesia and The Journal of Education in Perioperative Medicine, unified with the Association of University Anesthesiologists, aim to sponsor the Introduction to Clinical Research for Academic Anesthesiologists (ICRAA) Course. Directed toward early career academic anesthesiologists who wish to gain competency specifically in the fundamentals of clinical research and receive mentorship to develop an investigative project, the yearlong course will provide participants with the skills necessary to design research initiatives, ethically direct research teams, successfully communicate ideas with data analysts, and write and submit scientific articles. Additionally, the course, articulated in a series of interactive lectures, mentored activities, and workshops, will teach participants to review articles submitted for publication to medical journals and to critically appraise evidence in published research. It is our hope that this initiative will be of interest to junior faculty of academic anesthesiology departments nationally and internationally.

Endogenous pain modulatory processes appear to play an important role in shaping pain-related outcomes, but we know relatively little about the influence of psychosocial factors on those pain modulatory processes. The primary objective of this study was to explore associations between endogenous pain modulation (ie, conditioned pain modulation, CPM; temporal summation, TS), chronic pain, and negative affective factors (ie, depression, anxiety symptoms) in a sample of participants with chronic low back pain (CLBP) treated with long-term daily opioids.