Preferences for pharmacist counselling in patients with breast cancer: a discrete choice experiment.

With the shift of a large proportion of cancer chemotherapy recipients to ambulatory care, the role of hospital pharmacists has changed, and their provision of information is essential care for cancer patients. There is little research on pharmacist-patient relations, particularly about pharmacist counselling, in Japan. To meet patients' needs, pharmacist counselling should be optimized.

Development and validation of the Japanese version of the Decisional Conflict Scale to investigate the value of pharmacists' information: a before and after study.

Background: The information provided in patient-centered care and shared decision-making influences patients' concerns and adherence to treatment. In the decision-making process, patients experience decisional conflict. The Decisional Conflict Scale (DCS) is a 16-item, self-administered questionnaire consisting of 5 subscales developed to assess patients' decisional conflict.

Low-dose glucocorticoid therapy complements the pituitary-adrenocortical system and reduces anxiety and insomnia in myasthenia gravis patients.

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is an autoimmune disorder generally mediated by antibodies against the acetylcholine receptors of the skeletal muscles. Depending on the disease burden, MG patients may experience chronic dysregulation of both the hormonal stress axis and the immune system, consequently, aggravating the disease itself but also leading to secondary psychopathological abnormalities. A long-term clinical course requires long-term glucocorticoid (GC) therapy, which may change the psychological state by affecting the pituitary-adrenocortical system in MG patients.

[Direct conversion from low-dose morphine to transdermal fentanyl: efficacy for cancer pain and quality of life].

The efficacy and QOL in a cancer pain patient who converted to transdermal fentanyl from low-dose morphine (n=5) or high-dose morphine (n=5) were retrospectively compared. Cancer pain control was evaluated by visual analogue scales (VAS) score. Patients switched from low-dose morphine demonstrated significantly better scales.

Immunosuppressant pharmacodynamics on peripheral-blood mononuclear cells from patients with ulcerative colitis.

We investigated peripheral-blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) response to immunosuppressive drugs and its influence on glucocorticoid therapy in ulcerative colitis (UC). IC50s of immunosuppressive drugs on in vitro blastogenesis of PBMCs stimulated with concanavalin A were estimated in 76 UC and 146 healthy subjects. Individual differences in IC50s for prednisolone, methylprednisolone, cyclosporine, and tacrolimus on blastogenesis of PBMCs from UC patients were spread from 11.