Rejected

Opioids are commonly prescribed beyond what is necessary to adequately manage postoperative pain, increasing the likelihood of chronic opioid use, pill diversion, and misuse. We sought to assess opioid utilization and patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in patients undergoing ventral hernia repair (VHR) following the implementation of a patient-tailored opioid prescribing guideline.

Crohn's disease (CD) is a relapsing and progressive condition characterized by diarrhea, abdominal pain, weight loss, and hematochezia that results in serious complications such as perforations, fistulas, and abscesses. Various medications, interventions, and surgical treatments have been used to treat CD. The Korean guidelines for CD management were distributed in 2012 and revised in 2017 by the Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Research Group of the Korean Association for the Study of Intestinal Diseases. Substantial progress in mucosal immunologic research has elucidated the pathophysiology of IBD, leading to development of biological agents for treatment of CD. The first developed biologic agent, tumor necrosis factor-α agents, were shown to be efficacious in CD, heralding a new era in management of CD. Subsequently, vedolizumab, a monoclonal antibody against integrin α4β7, and ustekinumab, a human monoclonal antibody that inhibits the common p40 subunit of interleukin-12 and interleukin-23, were both approved for clinical use and are efficacious and safe for both induction and maintenance of remission in moderate-to-severe CD patients. Moreover, a recent study showed the non-inferiority of CT-P13, an infliximab biosimilar, compared with infliximab in CD patients. The third Korean guidelines for CD management provide updated information regarding treatment of moderate-to-severe CD patients with biologic agents. (Intest Res, Published online).

In a context of decreasing resources and growing health needs, evidence-based health and care policies are essential. This study aims to assess the health trends in Belgium between 1990 and 2019, to compare the Belgian health status to that of the EU-15 countries, and to identify the main drivers in trends over time and country differences within the EU-15.

Post-operative healing after clitoral reconstruction (CR) for Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) can be long and painful due to prolonged clitoral re-epithelialization time (3 months). Autologous Platelet-Rich Plasma (A-PRP) might reduce post operative clitoral epithelialization time and pain.

The aim of this study was to report the incidence and clinical course of a series of patients who were misdiagnosed with Bell's palsy and were eventually proven to have occult neoplasms.

Migraine surgery is a debilitating disorder that produces high costs and compromises the quality of life. This study aimed to evaluate surgery success and the longevity of the surgical benefit by trigger site.

We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate the effectiveness of moisturizers on acute radiation dermatitis (ARD) in breast cancer patients receiving radiotherapy (RT).

Occipital Neuralgia (ON) is a well-defined type of headache, whose treatment algorithm is still debated across medical specialties. From the analysis of the literature, it appears that surgical decompression of the occipital nerves is the most effective invasive approach to improve the quality of life of patients suffering from ON refractory to medications. We describe here a minimally invasive nerve and muscle sparing technique to decompress the occipital nerves.

The aim of this review was to combine the results of published cohort studies to determine the exact association between chronic liver disorders, and the severe form of COVID-19, and its associated complications.

Patients with chronic pain show large placebo effects in clinical trials, and inert pills can lead to clinically meaningful analgesia that can last from days to weeks. Whether the placebo response can be predicted reliably, and how to best predict it, is still unknown. We have shown previously that placebo responders can be identified through the language content of patients because they speak about their life, and their pain, after a placebo treatment. In this study, we examine whether these language properties are present before placebo treatment and are thus predictive of placebo response and whether a placebo prediction model can also dissociate between placebo and drug responders. We report the fine-tuning of a language model built based on a longitudinal treatment study where patients with chronic back pain received a placebo (study 1) and its validation on an independent study where patients received a placebo or drug (study 2). A model built on language features from an exit interview from study 1 was able to predict, a priori, the placebo response of patients in study 2 (area under the curve = 0.71). Furthermore, the model predicted as placebo responders exhibited an average of 30% pain relief from an inert pill, compared with 3% for those predicted as nonresponders. The model was not able to predict who responded to naproxen nor spontaneous recovery in a no-treatment arm, suggesting specificity of the prediction to placebo. Taken together, our initial findings suggest that placebo response is predictable using ecological and quick measures such as language use.