Pain medicine : the official journal of the American Academy of Pain Medicine
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Lumbar intervertebral disk herniation (LDH) is considered one of the major risk factors for lower back pain, mainly caused by irritation of a spinal nerve or its root. One of the genes related to pain perception is SCN9A, which encodes the voltage gated sodium channel NaV1.7, a key molecule involved in peripheral pain processing. It had been presented before that a common polymorphism within SCN9A (rs6746030: G > A, R1150W) might influence nociception in the general population. Hence, the present study was aimed at investigating the association between SCN9A polymorphism and pain sensitivity. ⋯ Our results suggest that the SCN9A rs6746030 polymorphism may be associated with pain intensity in patients suffering from symptomatic disc herniation.
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Review
Review of Factors, Methods, and Outcome Definition in Designing Opioid Abuse Predictive Models.
Several opioid risk assessment tools are available to prescribers to evaluate opioid analgesic abuse among chronic patients. The objectives of this study are to 1) identify variables available in the literature to predict opioid abuse; 2) explore and compare methods (population, database, and analysis) used to develop statistical models that predict opioid abuse; and 3) understand how outcomes were defined in each statistical model predicting opioid abuse. ⋯ We identified variables used to predict opioid abuse from electronic health records and administrative data. Medication variables are the recurrent variables in the articles reviewed (33 variables). Age and gender are the most consistent demographic variables in predicting opioid abuse. Overall, there is similarity in the sampling method and inclusion/exclusion criteria (age, number of prescriptions, follow-up period, and data analysis methods). Intuitive research to utilize unstructured data may increase opioid abuse models' accuracy.
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Effective treatments for insomnia exist, but few physicians treating headaches have routine methods for screening for insomnia. We sought to 1) describe the migraine characteristics and comorbid conditions that can affect sleep and 2) assess their relationships with positive screens on the Insomnia Severity Index (ISI). ⋯ Nearly half of the patients with suspected migraines in a headache center screened positive for insomnia, independent of whether they had episodic or chronic headaches. This would generate a substantial number of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) referrals. Given the strong association between comorbid musculoskeletal pain, depression, anxiety, and insomnia, we suggest prioritizing CBT-I referral for those patients regardless of their headache frequency.
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This study investigated the efficacy of vibration technology for women with hand pain due to osteoarthritis (OA) to see if mild compression and small vibrating motors were beneficial with periodic use. ⋯ Overall, the results demonstrated that the vibrating gloves were moderately helpful in reducing hand pain in women with OA (53.5%), and most expressed willingness to use the gloves (71.4%) and use the pain app (55.8%) in the future. Additional studies to determine the mechanism of action of the gloves in managing pain would be recommended.