Bill Schu

A new study in Nutrition Journal shows that patients suffering from systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) demonstrated significant improvement by taking fish oil supplements.

Mobility is great. Hypermobility? Less great. In the joints, hypermobility leads to musculoskeletal pain – and often times, lots of it. A recent review in the Journal of Pain Research outlined several of the challenges in treating generalized joint hypermobility (GJH) and found many difficult questions and few easy answers.

Recent study results suggest Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy (ICBT) could be useful for adolescents with anxiety disorders along with standard treatment delivered in child and adolescent psychiatric clinics.

Researchers seek to determine whether depression subtype is an useful predictor of which medication regimen might be most effective in treating patients with those subtypes.

Researchers have found that infants as young as 6 months old reveal atypical sensorimotor development that can be associated with autism spectrum disorder at 24 months.

Study results suggest that longer exposure to methotrexate and other disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs within the first year of diagnosis is associated with a significantly longer time to joint replacement surgery.

Experts from the Public Health Service and President Obama's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS have asked the administration in a letter to widen access to new, high-cost medications that successfully treat hepatitis C.

A new cohort review in BMJ suggests that even light to moderate alcoholic consumption is associated with minimally increased risk of overall cancer. Earlier studies have made the link to increased risk of cancer (particularly colorectal, female breast, oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, liver, and esophagus) for heavy consumption, but the news here is that even amounts less than 30 g/day have potential bearing on cancer risk.

A retrospective review in Clinical, Cosmetic & Investigational Dermatology tried to answer the difficult question of why African Americans (AA), who have a much lower incidence of melanoma than Caucasians do, have a five-year survival rate that is drastically lower than it is for Caucasian patients. This is what's known as the "minority melanoma paradox," and the reasons for it are not well-understood.

Medical researchers know there is a connection between psoriasis and cardiovascular diseases, but a new Iranian study in Clinical, Cosmetic & Investigational Dermatology further verifies lipid abnormalities linked to psoriasis and suggests a serum lipid profile and blood pressure check for all of those patients.

A systematic review of alopecia areata (AA) in Clinical, Cosmetic & Investigational Dermatology highlighted the unpredictability and lack of treatment options for the condition. But it also pointed to a larger problem: more than half of patients with AA experience poor health-related quality of life (QOL). Patients with AA are at risk for depression and anxiety, atopy, vitiligo, thyroid disease, and other autoimmune conditions.

Safe and effective tattoo removal has a sketchy history, but a new study in Lasers in Surgery and Medicine suggests that a new technique can clear unwanted ink more rapidly than conventional methods. The technique involves a combination approach to a well-known and widely accepted technique – removal with Q-switched lasers – with a perfluorodecalin (PFD)-infused silicone patch.

Researchers have developed a new rinse-off, hypertolerant shampoo specifically designed for the hypersensitive and problematic scalp.

Investigators have shown that changes in toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) mRNA expression level are significantly associated with major depressive disorder (MDD). The study, which appeared in Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, is a follow-up to an earlier study by the same researchers that first established the connection between TLR4 and MDD.

Some studies have shown the benefit of a blunt, Whitacre-type needle in reducing the incidence of intravascular injection during TFESI, but other studies showed that a short-bevel needle did not reduce the incidence of intravascular injection in lumbar TFESI compared to long-bevel, Quincke-type needles.

There has been a great deal of study on the placebo effect in the medical literature, and despite some evidence suggesting that placebo response rates in randomized controlled trials are higher in children and adolescents compared to adults, there has only been limited research involving the placebo response of children.

A recent study suggests that patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) have a higher incidence of obstructive sleep apnea syndrome that increases with the severity of cervical vertebral involvement. A separate study published on the same day suggests that specific exercise regimens may be beneficial for patients with AS.

Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) presents several diagnostic and treatment challenges, in part because etiology and pathogenesis remains relatively unknown. Most studies of OCD focus on adult patients, but there have been some studies of OCD onset before the age of 6 years, and the vast majority of OCD patients (80%) report that related symptoms began before age 18.

Data concerning general outcomes and indicating performance of general pain clinics remain sparse, according to a study in the Journal of Pain and Research. The United Kingdom study suggests that this lack of standardized measurements negatively impacts the ability to judge the overall effectiveness of pain clinics, both in the UK and in other parts of the world.

What can the length of a woman's fingers tell us about their susceptibility to acne vulgaris (AV)? Plenty, it turns out, according to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Dermatology. The study suggests that a more masculine second-to-fourth digit (2D:4D) ratio may predict sebum levels and, therefore, the potential for developing AV.

A recent study in The Journal of Headache and Pain sheds some additional light on the chronobiological experience of patients with cluster headache (CH). However, it still leaves lingering mysteries around the pattern of pain CH that patients typically experience, the triggers of those headaches, and the mechanisms and interactions that drive headache frequency and severity.

Treatment options for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have undergone an explosion in choice over the past 25 years and researchers recently analyzed a new combination therapy.

A new study suggests that pregabalin shows significantly greater improvements in pain-related interference of sleep relative to usual care in patients with chronic low back pain with accompanying neuropathic pain (CLBP-NeP).

For patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA), balneotherapy (mineral baths) combined with physical therapy may be more effective than physical therapy alone.

In 2014, the fracture risk algorithm FRAX celebrated its 20-year anniversary. Developed by a World Health Organization (WHO) study group in 1994, FRAX is a freely available diagnostic tool used to evaluate the 10-year probability of bone fracture risk, mostly for patients with osteoporosis. It is a part of many national health guidelines worldwide.

Safe, effective treatments for schizophrenia are well-established in the United States and worldwide, with several second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs) approved for use. But earlier schizophrenia studies have shown that several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – the genetic variations that can underlie differences in susceptibility to disease – are overexpressed in Caucasian patients with schizophrenia but not in their Chinese counterparts, and vice versa.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is challenging to diagnose and treat. As yet, there are no drugs currently licensed for BPD treatment. In fact, guidance from England's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommends that pharmacologic therapy not be used for patients with BPD at all. This is potentially troubling, because those patients typically experience rapid and extreme changes in mood, poor social functioning and have high rates of suicidal behavior.

Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) is one of the pain conditions that has remained fairly mysterious, but a new, effective treatment may be on the horizon. It is known that CRPS most often develops following trauma, however, and evidence suggests a maladaptive response to nervous system damage involving immune and inflammatory pathways as well as abnormalities in both peripheral and central processing of afferent inputs. No single therapy – including pharmacologic therapy – wholly addresses the condition.

Self-management for chronic or long-term conditions such as pain, diabetes, asthma, or arthritis is now a common part of long-term care. The same is not true for depression. At least, not yet. As clinicians learn more about depression, it has ceased to be viewed alongside other acute conditions and is now often thought of as chronic or long-term. Research shows that more than half of all people will have at least one further depressive episode after their first.

Inflammation may play an important role in patients with schizophrenia, new research determined, which could lead to improved treatments.