News by Subject Medicine & Health

Researchers funded by NIH have found that older Mexican Americans who suffer from pain were 1.7 times likelier to become frail, compared to study participants who did not report pain. The study published in The Journal of Pain by researchers at UTMB - Galveston, looked at pain as a predictor of frailty in older Mexican American adults in a follow-up period of 18 years. All participants were non-frail at the start of the study.

Regular use of prescription drugs for pain and sleep increases frailty risk by 95% among older adults. The possible implications of these research findings are especially serious given that it is common for older Americans to use two or more prescription drugs at the same time and many of these prescription drugs are for pain and sleep, including analgesics and sedatives.

A 7-year prospective cohort study from the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center (CMCVAMC), University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing), and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania examined the relationship between regional anesthesia (RA) administration and patient-reported pain-related outcomes among Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom service members sustaining a combat-related extremity injury.

A new study in the journal Addiction that uncovers several risk factors associated with postpartum opioid overdose.

Patients with advanced breast cancer that has spread to the skin are likely to cause more harm than good if they use complementary therapies to treat their skin lesions. Professor Maria João Cardoso told the Advanced Breast Cancer Fifth International Consensus Conference (ABC5) in Lisbon that there was a long list of herbal products and creams that patients often try, but many of them could delay wound healing and interfere with systemic anti-cancer treatments such as hormone therapy or chemotherapy.

A new study published today in Journal of Obstetrics Gynaecology Canada has found one in eight Australian women with endometriosis use cannabis to alleviate pain and other symptoms, rating the plant based medicine as the most effective way to self-manage the disorder. Researchers from NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University and UNSW Sydney surveyed 484 Australian women with endometriosis between the ages of 18 and 45 to determine the types of strategies they used to self-manage symptoms.

A new analysis of US data finds an unexpectedly high prevalence of prescription opioid use among youth. As recently as 2015-2016, 21% of adolescents and 32% of young adults said they had used these drugs in the past year. Nearly 4 percent and 8 percent, respectively, reported misusing opioids. Findings were published Nov. 5 in PLoS Medicine.

Watching immersive 360 videos of icy Arctic scenes helps to relieve intense burning pain and could hold hope for treating chronic pain, a small study has found.

Non-Hispanic black and Hispanic women were significantly more likely to report higher pain scores compared to non-Hispanic white women during the postpartum period. But despite higher pain scores, black and Hispanic women received significantly fewer morphine milligram equivalents (a measurement of opioids) than white patients and were significantly less likely to receive a prescription for an opioid at postpartum discharge, a new study found. The study shows black and Hispanic women experience disparities in pain management in postpartum care.