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With increasing costs of health care in the United States, attention is focused on expensive conditions. Musculoskeletal disorders with low back and neck pain account for the third highest amount of various disease categories. Minimally invasive interventional techniques for managing spinal pain, including epidural injections, have been considered to be growing rapidly. However, recent analyses of utilization of interventional techniques from 2000 to 2018 has shown a decline of 2.6% and a decline of 21% from 2009 to 2018 for epidural and adhesiolysis procedures.
Learn More >Pain is a common complaint presented in healthcare, but most epidemiological pain research has focused either on single pain conditions or on the adult population. The aim of this study was to investigate the 2017 consultation prevalence of a wide range of pain conditions in the general population of young people.
Learn More >Potential protective effects of nonpharmacological treatments (NPT) against long-term pain-related adverse outcomes have not been examined.
Learn More >Many genetic markers have been associated with variations in treatment response to analgesics, but none have been assessed in the context of combination therapies. In this study, the treatment effects of nortriptyline and morphine were tested for association with genetic markers relevant to pain pathways. Treatment effects were determined for single and combination therapies. A total of 24 functional Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) were tested within the gene loci of OPRM1, ABCB1, CYP2C19 and CYP2D6, COMT and HTR2A. Genotyping was performed in a population of neuropathic pain patients that previously participated in a clinical trial. For monotherapy, neither nortriptyline nor morphine responses were associated with SNPs. However, for nortriptyline + morphine combination therapy, the SNP rs1045642, within the drug efflux pump ABCB1 transporter significantly predicted analgesic response. The presence of the C allele accounted for 51% of pain variance in this subgroup in response to combination treatment. The T-allele homozygotes demonstrated only 20% improvement in pain scores, while the C-allele homozygotes 88%. There was no significant contribution of rs1045642 to the medication side-effects under all treatment conditions. The UK Biobank dataset was then used to validate this genetic association. Here, patients receiving similar combination therapy (opioid + tricyclic antidepressant) carrying the C allele of rs1045642 displayed 33% fewer body pain sites than patients without that allele, suggesting better pain control. In all, our results show a robust effect of the rs1045642 polymorphism on response to chronic pain treatment with a nortriptyline + morphine combination.
Learn More >Migraine is a chronic neurological disorder characterized by attacks of moderate or severe headache accompanying functionally and structurally maladaptive changes in brain. As the headache days/month is often measured by patient self-report and tends to be overestimated than actually experienced, the possibility of using neuroimaging data to predict migraine attack frequency is of great interest. To identify neuroimaging features that could objectively evaluate patients' headache days, a total of 179 migraineurs were recruited from two data center with one dataset used as the training/test cohort and the other used as the validating cohort. The guidelines for controlled trials of prophylactic treatment of chronic migraine in adults were used to identify the frequency of attacks and migraineurs were divided into low (MOl) and high (MOh) subgroups. Whole-brain functional connectivity was used to build multivariate logistic regression models with model iteration optimization to identify MOl and MOh. The best model accurately discriminated MOh from MOl with AUC of 0.91 (95%CI [0.86, 0.95]) in the training/test cohort and 0.79 in the validating cohort. The discriminative features were mainly located within the limbic lobe, frontal lobe, and temporal lobe. Permutation tests analysis demonstrated that the classification performance of these features was significantly better than chance. Furthermore, the indicator of functional connectivity had a higher odds ratio than behavioral variables with implementing a holistic regression analysis. The current findings suggested that the migraine attack frequency could be distinguished by using machine-learning algorithms, and highlighted the role of brain functional connectivity in revealing underlying migraine-related neurobiology.
Learn More >Patients who have limb amputation are at risk of chronic pain, including phantom limb pain, that can be challenging to treat. The aim of this study was to describe the incidence of preoperative opioid usage and the incidence and risk factors for new persistent postoperative opioid usage in opioid-naïve patients after limb amputation.
Learn More >The diagnostic criteria of episodic and chronic cluster headache (cCH) were recently modified, yet pathophysiological differences between the two are still unclear. The aim of this cross-sectional study is to identify and characterize other differences between episodic and cCH.
Learn More >Itch is a highly prevalent and multi-dimensional symptom. We aimed to analyze the association between itch and mental health in dermatological patients. This multi-center study is observational cross-sectional conducted in dermatological clinics across 13 European countries. A total of 3530 patients and 1094 healthy controls were included. Patients were examined clinically. Outcome measures were itch (presence, chronicity and intensity), the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, EQ5D-VAS, sociodemographics, suicidal ideation, stress (negative life events and economic difficulties). Ethical approval was obtained. Results showed significant association between the presence of itch in patients and clinical depression, suicidal ideation and economic difficulties (odds ratios respectively OR 1.53 (95% CI 1.15 to 2.02), OR 1.27 (95% CI 1.01 to 1.60), OR 1.24 (95% CI 1.10 to 1.50). The mean score of reported generic health status assessed by the EQ5D-VAS was 65.9 (SD=20.1) in patients with itch, compared to 74.7 (SD= 18.0) in patients without itch, p value < .001 and 74.9 (SD= 15.7) in controls with itch compared to 82.9 (SD= 15.6) in controls without itch, p value <.001. Itch contributes substantially to the psychological disease burden in dermatological patients and the management of patients should include access to multidisciplinary care.
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