Current clinical pharmacology
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Curr Clin Pharmacol · Jan 2017
ReviewPharmacology and Perioperative Considerations of Pain Medications.
Pain continues to be the most common medical concern, and perioperative health care providers are encountering increasing numbers of patients with chronic pain conditions. It is important to have a clear understanding of how long-term use of pain medications impacts anesthesia during the intraoperative and postoperative periods. ⋯ Management of postoperative pain is an important concern for all perioperative health care providers. Although most pain medications should be continued in the perioperative period, it is important to preoperatively discontinue those that antagonize pain receptors to avoid significant postoperative morbidities associated with poorly managed pain.
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Curr Clin Pharmacol · Jan 2017
ReviewThe Combination of New Immunotherapy and Radiotherapy: A N ew Potential Treatment for Locally Advanced Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.
Lung cancer is the main reason of cancer death worldwide. About 30% of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cases are diagnosed with locally advanced disease (stage III). This is a mixed population including patients who have far more extensive and bulky disease than others. ⋯ The integration of radiotherapy with immunotherapy is a conceptually promising strategy and several preclinical experiments have further developed the rationale for combining them. Radiotherapy has the capacity to overcome a lot of tumor immune escape mechanisms through the liberation of immunogenic private antigens showing a better local control and augmenting the immune response of systemic agents. This manuscript discusses the potential clinical interest for the combination of radiation and immunotherapy in locally advanced NSCLC.
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Curr Clin Pharmacol · Jan 2017
ReviewPharmacology and Perioperative Considerations for Psychiatric Medications.
Psychotropic medications are being used increasingly as analgesics and for other off-label indications for patients with and without psychiatric conditions. While the pharmacology of most of these drugs is now known, their interaction with anesthetic drugs and implications of regular use are still relatively unclear. ⋯ Psychotropic medications can be broadly divided into classes, which include antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, mood stabilizers, and stimulants. Although most evidence suggests the continuation of these medications in the perioperative period, it is still important to determine how psychotropic medications interact with routinely used anesthetic agents and which medications should be continued and which should not be continued on an individualized basis for each patient.
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Curr Clin Pharmacol · Jan 2017
Comparative Study Clinical TrialLevetiracetam in Compare to Sodium Valproate for Prophylaxis in Chronic Migraine Headache: A Randomized Double-Blind Clinical Trial.
Migraine is not curable, but preventive treatments are usually used to decrease the intensity and frequency of headache attacks. Different therapeutic options are widely studied for chronic migraine (CM), but all of them have different inefficacies. ⋯ According to our findings, levetiracetam offered improvement in headache frequency, severity, and MIDAS score in patients with CM. However, levetiracetam was not effective enough for chronic migraine as valproate, despite some significant effect. Thus levetiracetam can be one of the choices for limited chronic migraine subjects who are in contraindication of Valproate.