Articles: opioid.
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Semin. Arthritis Rheum. · Oct 2015
Use of prescription analgesic medication and pain catastrophizing after total joint replacement surgery.
To survey the use of analgesic medication 4.8 years after total joint replacement (TJR) surgery and assess the determinants of medication usage. ⋯ Use of opioid medication 4 years post-TJR is very high in our study population. In addition to joint, back and body pain, a major contributor to opioid use is pain catastrophizing. Our data suggest that current opioid and other analgesic prescribing patterns may benefit from considering the catastrophizing characteristics of patients.
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Opioids may alter immune function, thereby potentially affecting cancer recurrence. The authors investigated the association between postdiagnosis opioid use and breast cancer recurrence. ⋯ This large, prospective cohort study provided no clinically relevant evidence of an association between opioid prescriptions and breast cancer recurrence. The current findings are important to cancer survivorship, because opioids are frequently used to manage pain associated with comorbid conditions.
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To determine if patients receiving chronic opioid therapy can be tapered to lower opioid doses without a subsequent increase in pain. ⋯ Patients in the population studied can be successfully tapered to lower opioid doses and may not necessarily experience more pain.
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This study measured the following: violence rates against chronic pain care providers (CPCPs), character/context/risk factors for violence and CPCPs' mitigation strategies. ⋯ CPCPs were at high risk for violence. Risk factors were older age, male, working part time, and anesthesiology. Risk was highest in the context of opioid management and disability. Discharging patient was the most common risk mitigation. A significant number of physicians carried firearms.
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In spite of several approved analgesics, the therapy of pain still constitutes a challenge due to the fact that the drugs do not exert sufficient efficacy or are associated with severe side effects. Therefore, the development of new and improved painkillers is still of great importance. A number of highly qualified scientists in Germany are investigating signal transduction pathways in pain, effectivity of new drugs and the so far incompletely investigated mechanisms of well-known analgesics in preclinical and clinical studies. The highlights of pharmacological pain research in Germany are summarized in this article.