Pain

While a common method used to treat low back pain may provide immediate relief, its effects do not extend for a substantial period of time, a new analysis has found.

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.

Not only have researchers from Mount Sinai Hospital discovered that common antidepressants can help treat neuropathy, but they also identified the gene associated with pain and depression.

Leflunomide, marketed under the brand name Arava, is a safe and effective treatment for early rheumatoid arthritis, according to a study in International Journal of Rheumatic Diseases.

Patients with fibromyalgia typically experience widespread chronic pain and a new study adds to the evidence that emotional impact is prominent as well.

Treatment for rheumatoid arthritis may be delivered like a vaccine, according to findings from Science Translational Medicine.

Female mice models felt pain differently than their male counterparts, according to a study published in Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers from Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) may have found a way to control cell functions in order to alleviate intractable pain.

Study results show that opioid overdoses appear to frequently occur in patients who are not chronic users with high prescribed doses of opioids, in contrast to the patient groups targeted by current opioid prescribing guidelines.

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.

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.

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.

New research suggests that a 10-second self assessment might provide nearly as much information about psoriatic arthritis case progression as complex tests that generally require either require laboratory results or formal joint-by-joint evaluation.

It has long been suspected that some foods and lifestyle factors can cause painful acute gout attacks. Now, for the first time, researchers have shown that eating tomatoes contributes to the flares.

Oral contraceptives (OCs) may have a notable impact on mood and disease activity in patients with arthritis, according to a new analysis published in Arthritis Care & Research.

The number of opioid-related deaths nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2011 in the US; and while that number continues to increase, one state has made positive strides with the implementation of two initiatives.

Medical marijuana is often labeled incorrectly or insufficiently, according to a research letter from JAMA.

An 8-week online intervention targeting cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social pain determinants appears to improve pain intensity, pain interference, and pain self-efficacy among participants.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the prescription of OxyContin, an extended-release opioid, for particular pediatric patients.

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.

Cardiovascular disease is the most common comorbidity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and the reason behind it may have finally been identified.

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.

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.

As the population ages and medicine continues to advance, people are living longer and healthier; but they are also taking more medications for more medical conditions. Those medications can cause drug-drug interactions that lead to adverse drug reactions (ADR). Studies have shown that the majority of medication errors happen at the stage of prescription.

With public health concerns surrounding opioid use, a recent study looked at the potential for the opioid analgesic buprenorphine to counteract some of these concerns.

Researchers who looked at the potential association between post-diagnosis opioid use and breast cancer recurrence found no clinically relevant evidence of an association between opioid prescriptions and breast cancer recurrence.