Publications by authors named "Duff I"

Pain after surgery causes significant suffering. Opioid analgesics cause severe side effects and accidental death. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop non-opioid therapies for managing post-surgical pain.

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Article Synopsis
  • Current guidelines suggest a personalized and combination approach to pain management, emphasizing the use of both drug and non-drug therapies, with a focus on reducing chronic pain risks in acute pain cases like surgery or trauma.
  • Auricular vagus nerve stimulation (aVNS) is explored as a potentially effective non-drug therapy for managing both chronic and acute pain, with this study aiming to assess its clinical efficacy and safety.
  • The analysis included 23 studies on chronic pain, 12 on acute postoperative pain, and 7 on experimental acute pain, finding significant pain reduction in chronic conditions through aVNS compared to sham treatments, indicating its potential effectiveness.
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Article Synopsis
  • * Research has shown that a product called Clarix Flo (FLO), derived from human amniotic membranes, can effectively reduce post-surgical pain in mice without the negative effects associated with opioids, by directly acting on pain-signaling neurons.
  • * The study identified a purified component from human amniotic membrane, HC-HA/PTX3, which not only mimics the pain-relief effects of FLO but also works by altering neuron behavior to reduce pain, signaling the potential of biologics from birth tissues as a safer alternative for pain management.
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Introduction: Nucleotractotomy is an efficient surgical technique that provides a high pain relief rate for specific clinical indications. There are two main approaches for performing this operation: an open and percutaneous technique.

Methods: In the Federal Center of Neurosurgery (Novosibirsk, Russia) from 2016 to 2022, 13 trigeminal nucleotractotomies (7 open and 6 percutaneous) were performed in 12 patients (5 women and 7 men).

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Chronic pain is highly prevalent in the pediatric population. Many factors are involved in the transition from acute to chronic pain. Currently, there are conceptual models proposed, but they lack a mechanistically sound integrated theory considering the stages of child development.

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Objectives: Chronic pain is primarily treated with pharmaceuticals, but the effects remain unsatisfactory. A promising alternative therapy is peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS), but it has been associated with suboptimal efficacy because its modulation mechanisms are not clear and the current therapies are primarily open loop (ie, manually adjusting the stimulation parameters). In this study, we developed a proof-of-concept computational modeling as the first step toward implementing closed-loop PNS in future biological studies.

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Objective: To determine the prevalence of rheumatic diseases in Han Chinese in north and south China.

Methods: Samples of 4192 adults in the Beijing (north) and 5057 in the Shantou (south) areas, based on village administration registers, were studied. The same questionnaire was administered by doctors who then examined those with rheumatic symptoms.

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In 88.9% of a group of 18 patients with rheumatoid arthritis participating in an open-label study with fenoprofen calcium (Nalfon), there was observed a mean titre decrease in level of rheumatoid factor as compared to baseline levels. In follow-up, three months to one year later, a uniform titre increase above the mean level of the study period had occurred.

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Thirty patients with active definite or classic rheumatoid arthritis (RA), participated in a double-blind crossover study comparing fenoprofen calcium with placebo. All patients were receiving maintenance gold therapy. Fenoprofen was administered in doses ranging from 200 to 800 mg every six hours.

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