Pain Management Using Clinical Pharmacy Assessments With and Without Pharmacogenomics in an Oncology Palliative Medicine Clinic.

Purpose: Approximately 30% of patients with cancer who have pain have symptomatic improvement within 1 month using conventional pain management strategies. Engaging clinical pharmacists in palliative medicine (PM) and use of pharmacogenomic testing may improve cancer pain management.

Methods: Adult patients with cancer with uncontrolled pain had baseline assessments performed by PM providers using the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale.

Deep electrode insertion and sound coding in cochlear implants.

Present-day cochlear implants demonstrate remarkable speech understanding performance despite the use of non-optimized coding strategies concerning the transmission of tonal information. Most systems rely on place pitch information despite possibly large deviations from correct tonotopic placement of stimulation sites. Low frequency information is limited as well because of the constant pulse rate stimulation generally used and, being even more restrictive, of the limited insertion depth of the electrodes.