Rejected

The incidence of spinal cord injury in Brazil is increasing. It is important to understand more about how individuals are living with spinal cord injury.

To compare the analgesic efficacy of ultrasound-guided selective peripheral nerve block (PNB) and sub-dissociative dose ketamine (SDK) for management of acute pain in patients with extremity injuries presenting to the emergency department (ED).

Opioid use disorder has caused significant morbidity and mortality resulting in opioid prescribing limiting laws, such as State Bill 273 in West Virginia. The purpose of this study is to explore the impacts of a restrictive opioid prescription law on physicians in medical practice in West Virginia.

The most effective treatment for knee joint pain is total knee arthroplasty (TKA), but the risk of pain and swelling in patients after surgery is high. Ice application, ankle pump exercise and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory painkillers are the primary clinical treatments after surgery. However, long-term use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory pain relievers can easily cause gastrointestinal damage. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) ointments and tuina therapy integrate TCM and manipulation, which effectively promotes the penetration of TCM into the skin lesions, improves local blood circulation and inflammatory reaction and has good long-term effects on patients.

 The addition of ultrasound-guided percutaneous cryoanalgesia (PCr) for pain management after pectus excavatum (PE) surgery offers a new and advantageous approach. Our aim is to describe our experience with PCr applied on the same day, 24 hours, and 48 hours prior to PE surgery.

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a highly recurrent chronic inflammatory skin disease, characterized by severe itching, immune imbalance, and skin barrier dysfunction. Damage to the skin barrier function is known to be the main cause of Th1/Th2 immune imbalance, due to the Th2-mediated immune response, and pro-inflammatory cytokines, including IL-4, IL-5, IL-13 and IL-31 and it plays an important role in further eliciting the environment of AD through stimulation. Currently, the most widely used drugs for the treatment of AD are corticosteroids, antihistamines and immunosuppressants (used by more than 60% of patients), which are reported to exhibit various side effects when taken for a long time. Therefore, interest in the physiological activity of safer plant-derived natural extracts is increasing. is traditionally used in oriental medicine for bruises, habitual pain, gastric and postpartum hemorrhage. Recent studies have reported that it exhibits antioxidant anti-inflammatory and anti-hepatotoxic activity, but the role and activity of in AD have not yet been studied. Therefore, in this study, the new physiological activity of in the AD environment was investigated, suggesting its potential as a natural therapeutic agent.

A 37-year-old man presented with painless jaundice and pruritus. Total Bilirubin was 30-fold the upper limit of normal (ULN), while ALT and further cholestasis parameters were found to be only slightly elevated. As comprehensive diagnostics showed no abnormal findings and ruled out frequent causes of elevated cholestasis markers, we performed a liver biopsy. The biopsy revealed canalicular cholestasis with ductopenia and periportal fibrosis. Only after a further and intensive anamnesis a ligandrol-abuse could be determined as cause for the symptoms. Ligandrol is misused as a selective androgen receptor modulator to promote muscle building. This case represents a typical case of abuse of anabolic substances in amateur sports.

Lumbar epidural analgesia (EA) is the most commonly used method for reducing labour pain, but its impact on the duration of the second stage of labour and on neonatal and maternal outcomes remains a matter of debate. Our aim was to examine whether EA affected the course and the outcomes of labour among patients divided according to the Robson-10 group classification system.

To compare patient-reported experience between a Penn expander activated every other day vs twice daily.

Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) are a population of cells that circulate in the blood looking for areas of endothelial or vascular injury in order to repair them. Endothelial dysfunction is an important component of disorders with neurovascular involvement. Thus, the subject of involvement of EPCs in such conditions has been gaining increasing scientific interest in recent years. Overall, decreased levels of EPCs are associated with worse disease outcome. Moreover, their functionalities appear to decline with severity of disease. These findings inspired the application of EPCs as therapeutic targets and agents. So far, EPCs appear safe and promising based on the results of pre-clinical studies conducted on their use in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease and ischemic stroke. In the case of the latter, human clinical trials have recently started to be performed in this subject and provided optimistic results thus far. Whereas in the case of migraine, existing findings pave the way for testing EPCs in in vitro studies. This review aims to thoroughly summarize current knowledge on the role EPCs in four disorders with neurovascular involvement, which are Alzheimer's disease, cerebral small vessel disease, ischemic stroke and migraine, with a particular focus on the potential practical use of these cells as a treatment remedy.