Rejected

The global cancer burden is significantly increasing at an alarming rate affecting patients, relatives, communities, and health-care system. Cancer patients require adequate pain relief and palliative care throughout the life course, especially in terminal illness. Although opioid treatment is successful in majority of patients, around 40% do not achieve enough analgesia or are prone to serious side effects and toxicity. The treatment of medical conditions with cannabis and cannabinoid compounds is constantly expanding. This review organizes the current knowledge in the context of SNPs associated with opioids and nonopioids and its clinical consequences in pain management and pharmacogenetic targets of cannabinoids, for use in clinical practice.

Pseudotumor cerebri syndrome (PTCS) is an uncommon disease in children. On-time diagnosis and treatment can prevent irreversible visual loss. Although headache is the most common complaint of children with this syndrome, the present case report reported a child with neck rigidity and torticollis, declined by the reduction of intracranial pressure. Despite the importance of torticollis and neck rigidity presented in various significant neurological disorders in need of thorough investigations, in the case of unexplained symptoms of those disorders, it is recommended to consider fundoscopic examinations for PTCS to prevent its vital complications.

The current study was conducted aiming at the investigation of pain beliefs and perceptions and their relationship with coping strategies, stress, anxiety, and depression in patients with cancer.

In the era of enhanced recovery after surgery, clinicians are encouraged to develop optimized programs for patients who require surgery. Minimal intervention with laparoscopic surgery and multimodal pain management mostly with peripheral nerve block are key components. We are developing a departmental program for enhanced recovery after surgery for single-port laparoscopic surgery. We applied an erector spinae plane block, a novel, newly recognized block, bilaterally at the T10 transverse process with a small dose (10 mL) of local anesthetic. This method was effective and safe and resulted in successful analgesia in a patient who received single-port surgery. This surgery requires a 3-5 cm horizontal or longitudinal periumbilical incision, which was performed in this case, and our results were promising and encouraging.

Cluster headache (CH) is a primary headache disorder characterized by unilateral headache attacks lasting 15 to 180 minutes, occurring between two and eight times a day, and accompanied by autonomic symptoms ipsilateral to the pain. However, cases of symptomatic CH that occur secondary to an underlying structural pathology have also been reported in the literature. In this report, seven patients are presented who were admitted with signs of CH and diagnosed with acute rhinosinusitis depending on extensive clinical and radiologic examinations. Symptomatic CH, though rarely reported in the literature compared to CH, should be kept in mind in patients presenting with the first attack of CH. Moreover, in such patients, whether the pain becomes worse when bending forward and becomes sensitive on palpation should be questioned, and a radiologic work-up should be performed to rule out secondary causes such as rhinosinusitis. In the present cases, the resolution of CH attacks with acute sinusitis therapy confirmed the diagnosis.

Modified radical mastectomy (MRM) is the most common surgery for cancer breast that is associated with marked postoperative pain. Effective control of this pain suppresses the surgical stress response and decreases the opioids and general anesthetics' needs. This study compared the erector spinae plane (ESP) block and the pectoral plane (PECS) block effects on the opioid consumption postoperatively, stress response, fentanyl needs intraoperatively, pain scores, and incidence of complications in female patients subjected to MRM surgery.

Upper extremity pain among manual wheelchair users induces functional decline and reduces quality of life. Research has identified chronic overuse due to wheelchair propulsion as one of the factors associated with upper limb injuries. Lack of a feasible tool to track wheelchair propulsion in the community precludes testing validity of wheelchair propulsion performed in the laboratory. Recent studies have shown that wheelchair propulsion can be tracked through machine learning methods and wearable accelerometers. Better results were found in subject-specific machine learning method. To further develop this technique, we conducted a pilot study examining the feasibility of measuring wheelchair propulsion patterns.

Long-term treatment is recommended in major depressive disorder (MDD) to prevent relapse and to restore functioning. The aim of this study (Orion; NCT01360866) was to assess the long-term safety, tolerability, and efficacy of open-label treatment with adjunctive brexpiprazole in adult patients with MDD.

Placebo and nocebo effects represent one of the most fascinating topics in the health care field.

Chronic pain is an endemic problem involving both peripheral and brain pathophysiology. Although biomarkers have revolutionized many areas of medicine, biomarkers for pain have remained controversial and relatively underdeveloped. With the realization that biomarkers can reveal pain-causing mechanisms of disease in brain circuits and in the periphery, this situation is poised to change. In particular, brain pathophysiology may be diagnosable with human brain imaging, particularly when imaging is combined with machine learning techniques designed to identify predictive measures embedded in complex data sets. In this review, we explicate the need for brain-based biomarkers for pain, some of their potential uses, and some of the most popular machine learning approaches that have been brought to bear. Then, we evaluate the current state of pain biomarkers developed with several commonly used methods, including structural magnetic resonance imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography. The field is in the early stages of biomarker development, but these complementary methodologies have already produced some encouraging predictive models that must be tested more extensively across laboratories and clinical populations.