Pain

For people diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis that show only mild symptoms of joint pain and swelling, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are usually the first treatment option to consider.

The opioid overdose epidemic and resulting focus on preventing opioid abuse and diversion could threaten access to effective medications for patients with legitimate medical needs.

Despite rampant opioid misuse, abuse, and diversion self-reported by chronic pain patients in a study presented at the American Pain Society 33rd Annual Scientific Meeting, primary care providers tended to downgrade the patients' risk for engaging in those drug-related aberrant behaviors, indicating a gap between physicians' objective risk assessment for opioid abuse and the actual extent of the problem.

Among adult patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), pain severity can impact performance on cognitive tests, suggesting that pain independently contributes to impaired brain function in MS.

Medical and nursing schools that reported extensively incorporating the topic of pain care into prelicensure curricula do not offer more robust pain management education programs than those indicating minimal or moderate pain course integration.

Patients who are hospitalized for pain related to acute pancreatitis pose unique challenges for achieving adequate analgesia, which is particularly true for those admitted with preexisting chronic pain and prior opioid use.

Though constipation as a side effect of opioid therapy is generally considered a tolerability issue that can be treated with over-the-counter laxatives, opioid-induced constipation may still lead to serious gastrointestinal complications.

Teasing out relevant the relationship among risk factors, comorbidities, and migraine is challenging but critical for optimal migraine treatment.

For many migraine sufferers, current strategies to treat headaches, or to prevent their occurrence, are insufficient to ward off the near-daily occurrence of head pain, prompting researchers to investigate methods of pre-emptive migraine treatment.

The clinical challenge of accurate headache diagnosis in the office can be overcome by taking a broad view of the various diagnostic categories of headache.

Although the concept of delivering chronic pain care through multidisciplinary clinics is less than half a century old, John Loeser, MD, believes the model has already surpassed its peak in the United States, mainly due to financial reasons.

With the co-occurrence of chronic pain and cancer amassing from improved cancer survival rates, it is increasingly important for healthcare professionals to understand how the conditions interrelate and influence patients' quality of life.

Expanding upon previous investigations of the associations among low vitamin D levels, chronic pain, and poor sleep within the general and non-pain populations, a research poster presented at the American Pain Society 33rd Annual Scientific Meeting suggests correcting inadequate vitamin D levels in middle-aged to older patients with knee osteoarthritis may reduce their clinical pain and improve sleep quality.

Although the benefit of Botox (onabotulinumtoxinA) for preventing headaches in adults with chronic migraine has been extensively established in clinical trials, limited data exists on the injections' effectiveness for the indication beyond 5 treatment cycles.

Researchers used a combination of stem cells, growth factors, and scaffold to grow human cartilage, which they hope will heal patients with osteoarthritis and other joint pain.

A cancer analgesic has been awarded fast track status by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Literature review by the AAN shows that oral and oral spray forms of medical marijuana effectively treat some symptoms of MS, but there is little evidence to support efficacy in treating other neurologic diseases such as Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and Tourette syndrome.