Pain prevalence in cancer patients: status quo or opportunities for improvement?

Purpose Of Review: Cancer incidence increases worldwide and thus more patients will suffer from cancer pain. As cancer pain severely affects quality of life, the decrease of pain should be of high priority for every clinician. In the last decade, attention for cancer pain and for its treatment has increased, and new pharmacological based treatment options became available.

Cigarette smoking, disease severity and autoantibody expression in African Americans with recent-onset rheumatoid arthritis.

Objective: To examine the association of smoking with clinical and serological features in African Americans with recent-onset rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and to explore whether this association is dependent on the presence of the HLA-DRB1 shared epitope (SE).

Methods: In African Americans with recent-onset RA (n = 300), we examined the association of cigarette smoking (current versus past versus never and pack-years of exposure) with anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibody, rheumatoid factor (RF) (IgM and IgA), rheumatoid nodules and baseline radiographic erosions using logistic and cumulative logistic regression (adjusting for SE status). We also examined for evidence of interaction between smoking status and SE for all outcomes.