Management of Refractory Cancer Pain with Intrathecal Drug Delivery and Spinal Cord Stimulation.

Background: Intrathecal pumps (ITPs) are indicated for refractory cancer pain and decrease systemic opioid requirements. While not yet indicated for cancer pain, spinal cord stimulators (SCSs) are used off-label for cancer pain, with increasing evidence of their efficacy.

Materials And Methods: A retrospective chart review was conducted of patients who underwent both ITP and at least SCS trial for cancer pain.

Virtual Reality in Acute and Chronic Pain Medicine: An Updated Review.

Purpose Of Review: This review critically analyzes the recent literature on virtual reality's (VR) use in acute and chronic pain management, offering insights into its efficacy, applications, and limitations.

Recent Findings: Recent studies, including meta-analyses and randomized controlled trials, have demonstrated VR's effectiveness in reducing pain intensity in various acute pain scenarios, such as procedural/acute pain and in chronic pain conditions. The role of factors such as immersion and presence in enhancing VR's efficacy has been emphasized.

Telehealth and Virtual Reality Technologies in Chronic Pain Management: A Narrative Review.

Purpose Of Review: This review provides medical practitioners with an overview of the present and emergent roles of telehealth and associated virtual reality (VR) applications in chronic pain (CP) management, particularly in the post-COVID-19 healthcare landscape.

Recent Findings: Accumulated evidence points to the efficacy of now well-established telehealth modalities, such as videoconferencing, short messaging service (SMS), and mobile health (mHealth) applications in complementing remote CP care. More recently, and although still in early phases of clinical implementation, a wide range of VR-based interventions have demonstrated potential for improving the asynchronous remote management of CP.

Spinal Cord Stimulation in the Treatment of Cancer Pain: A Retrospective Review.

Objectives: Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) involves electrical stimulation of the dorsal spinal cord to disrupt the transmission of ascending pain signals. SCS has been used successfully to manage a variety of chronic pain conditions, but its efficacy in the treatment of pain syndromes in patients with cancer has not been established because most studies have involved a limited number of patients. The purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of SCS in a large group of patients with cancer.

How well did our students match? A peer-validated quantitative assessment of medical school match success: the match quality score.

: Assessment of an individual medical school's performance in the match is an important outcome of the educational program. Unfortunately, student rank lists are not public. A method to objectively gauge the quality of an institution's match regardless of student preference has not been described in the literature.

Intraoperative Neuromonitoring During Thyroid Surgery: The Effect of Surgical Positioning.

Intraoperative neuromonitoring during thyroid surgery has been used to successfully prevent permanent neurological injury by early identification of anatomical variants. Proper interpretation of neuromonitoring data requires knowledge of what factors might affect the data. In this study, we examined the effect of surgical positioning on the latency and amplitude of neural recordings made from the vocalis muscle during thyroid surgery.

Disparities of Immunotherapy Utilization in Patients with Stage III Cutaneous Melanoma: A National Perspective.

Background/aim: Immunotherapy combined with surgery is associated with better survival than surgery alone in patients with advanced melanoma. This study examined the utilization of immunotherapy in relation to population characteristics and the associated survival benefit.

Materials And Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study utilizing the US National Cancer Database.

Lexical selection in the semantically blocked cyclic naming task: the role of cognitive control and learning.

Studies of semantic interference in language production have provided evidence for a role of cognitive control mechanisms in regulating the activation of semantic competitors during naming. The present study investigated the relationship between individual differences in cognitive control abilities, for both younger and older adults, and the degree of semantic interference in a blocked cyclic naming task. We predicted that individuals with lower working memory capacity (as measured by word span), lesser ability to inhibit distracting responses (as measured by Stroop interference), and a lesser ability to resolve proactive interference (as measured by a recent negatives task) would show a greater increase in semantic interference in naming, with effects being larger for older adults.

Impairments in learning, memory, and metamemory following childhood head injury.

Objective: To assess postinjury changes in learning, memory, and metamemory abilities following childhood traumatic brain injury.

Design: Prospective, longitudinal with 5 assessments made from baseline to 24 months postinjury.

Participants: A total of 167 children (aged 5-15 years) with traumatic brain injury (TBI; 64 severe, 55 moderate, and 48 mild).

Planning in sentence production: evidence for the phrase as a default planning scope.

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are consistent with a phrasal scope of planning, they might also be explained on the basis of: (1) greater retrieval fluency for the second content word in the simple initial noun phrase sentences and (2) visual grouping factors.

Consequences of an inhibition deficit for word production and comprehension: evidence from the semantic blocking paradigm.

We investigated the semantic blocking effect in picture naming and word-picture matching for two nonfluent aphasic patients who show evidence of a deficit in inhibiting verbal representations (M.L. and B.