Latest Conference Articles

Pain management is everyone's job. It's a human problem.

Oxycodone is one opioid option for patients with chronic pain and other conditions. The drug, however, has not been extensively studied in older patients.

"Opiates are not the first line for every condition; they should not be reflexively prescribed," said Alexis LaPietra, DO, St. Joseph's Medical Center.

Different types of pain respond to different medications; so a collaborative team across the United States and United Kingdom looked at how the Chronic Pain Questionnaire (CPQ) can assist in making those important treatment decisions.

There’s many benefits to using nitrous oxide for analgesia – which is why it’s a staple for dentists. Dubbed “laughing gas,” the tasteless, colorless gas has proven to be safe and effective for both adults and children.

There is a lot of regulatory scrutiny, media attention, and confusion about managing pain, so patient education should be at the forefront of physicians' minds.

It may seem like opioids could be a “quick fix” for acute low back pain, but introducing the drugs early on increases the risk for dependency and addiction.

Pain is the single most common reason people seek medical attention - more than heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension.

When a patient presents at the emergency room with severe pain, there are various things to take into consideration before deciding on a course of action. But there are new options out there that probably aren’t at the forefront of your thinking.

Presented at PAINWeek 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada, researchers looked at how turmeric could be used as a safer, more tolerable option for pain control.

In March 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published new guidelines for prescribing opioids. And while the aim is to curb the deadly opioid epidemic, some physicians saying that the changes could cause other prescription issues.

Oxycodone, morphine, hydrocodone, and codeine are among the commonly recognized prescription painkillers. But levorphanol is one that has been around since 1953, yet is often left behind for a newer medication.

The subjectivity of pain is just one of the reasons that it’s challenging to manage. A common strategy comes in the form of prescription drugs, which poses its own set of challenges. Therefore, it isn’t clear how well opioids actually work.

Dr. Fricton of the University of Minnesota and HealthPartners Institute for Education and Research explored how to make transformative care a practical part in treating patients with chronic pain.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) created the Guidance for the Assessment of Abuse Potential of drugs for patients who have a history of recreational opioid use. But does the strategy actually work?

At The European Society of Cardiology Congress 2016 (ESC), Ibrahim Danad, MD, VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands, explained the results from his team's PACIFIC trial, which assessed two non-invasive coronary artery imaging tools: positon emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT).

Thousands of cardiologists and other attendees at the ESC Congress 2016 got to meet Pope Francis, who told them he marveled at the science and human mystery of the heart.

About a quarter of patients who survived heart attacks due to blocked arteries could be treated with drugs, not invasive procedures. The trick is determining whether the blockage is cause by plaque erosion, not plaque rupture. With optical coherence tomography a team in Boston did just that.

At the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2016 (ESC) in Rome, Italy, Anselm Gitt, MD discussed the DYSIS program, which was designed to get an idea to see how patients were treated for secondary prevention, focusing on dyslipidemia patients.

The antiplatelet drugs prasugrel and ticagrelor are both fine for dual antiplatelet therapy following acute myocardial infarctions with ST segment elevations, a Czech study found.

Drug-eluting stents are falling far short of their promises of fewer complications, improved mortality and quality of life, a study found. In the largest study ever done comparing newer drug-eluting stents to bare metal devices, Norwegian researchers found the drug stents did not show a difference in these outcomes.

At the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2016 (ESC) in Rome, Italy, Chris Cannon, MD, Brigham & Women's Hospital, discussed the latest changes with the dyslipidemia guidelines.

Adding a PCSK9 inhibitor to apheresis therapy worked so well in reducing LDL in patients with familial hypercholesterolemia that two-thirds of the patients stopped getting apheresis.

At the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2016 (ESC) in Rome, Italy, Michael Lincoff, MD, Cleveland Clinic explained results from ACCELERATE trial involving patients with high risk vascular disease who received evacetrapib on top of standard care.

Renato Delascio Lopes, MD, Duke University Medical Center, discussed at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2016 (ESC), the progress of anticoagulant therapies for patients.

Victor Sandor, MD, Array BioPharma, shared results from ARRY 797 study at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2016.

Should cardiac rehab be standard for patients who've had a heart attack. If so, how long should it last? A Dutch study found a year was about right.

Apheresis, the blood-filtering treatment used to remove cholesterol, appears to work for patients whose angina cannot be alleviated with drugs or surgical interventions researchers said today.

Simple preventive measures like reducing cholesterol and blood pressure should cut the risk of heart disease deaths and hospitalizations by up to 90%, an analysis found.

At the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2016 (ESC), Sigrun Halvorsen, MD, Oslo University discussed the results of her study which analyzed the bleeding rates among NVAF patients who were prescribed anticoagulants.