Background: Shared decision making is rarely used in anaesthesia consultations. Because either spinal or general anaesthesia can be appropriate for many patients undergoing surgery to repair a hip fracture, this is an appropriate context to implement and test shared decision making and associated resources for anaesthesia decisions. Conversation aids can facilitate shared decision making between clinicians, patients, and caregivers about treatment choices.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Hip fracture surgery under general or spinal anesthesia is a common procedure for older adults in the United States (US). Although spinal or general anesthesia can be appropriate for many patients, and the choice between anesthesia types is preference-sensitive, shared decision-making is not consistently used by anesthesiologists counseling patients on anesthesia for this procedure. We designed an Option Grid™-style conversation aid, My Anesthesia Choice─Hip Fracture, to promote shared decision making in this interaction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInteractions between the immune system and the nervous system are crucial in maintaining homeostasis, and disturbances of these neuro-immune interactions may participate in carcinogenesis and metastasis. Nerve endings have been identified within solid tumors in humans and experimental animals. Although the involvement of the efferent sympathetic and parasympathetic innervation in carcinogenesis has been extensively investigated, the role of the afferent sensory neurons and the neuropeptides in tumor development, growth, and progression is recently appreciated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe role of the nervous system in cancer development and progression has been under experimental and clinical investigation since nineteenth-century observations in solid tumor anatomy and histology. For the first half of the twentieth century, methodological limitations and opaque mechanistic concepts resulted in ambiguous evidence of tumor innervation. Differential spatial distribution of viable or disintegrated nerve tissue colocalized with neoplastic tissue led investigators to conclude that solid tumors either are or are not innervated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To assess the accuracy of self-reported financial conflict-of-interest (COI) disclosures in the () and the () within the requisite disclosure period prior to article submission.
Design: Cross-sectional investigation.
Data Sources: Original clinical-trial research articles published in (n=206) or (n=188) from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2017; self-reported COI disclosure forms submitted to or with the authors' published articles; Open Payments website (from database inception; latest search: August 2019).
Surgery remains an essential therapeutic approach for most solid malignancies. Although for more than a century accumulating clinical and experimental data have indicated that surgical procedures themselves may promote the appearance and progression of recurrent and metastatic lesions, only in recent years has renewed interest been taken in the mechanism by which metastasizing of cancer occurs following operative procedures. It is well proven now that surgery constitutes a risk factor for the promotion of pre-existing, possibly dormant micrometastases and the acceleration of new metastases through several mechanisms, including the release of neuroendocrine and stress hormones and wound healing pathway-associated immunosuppression, neovascularization, and tissue remodeling.
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