A Comparison of the Pain Assessment Checklist for Seniors with Limited Ability to Communicate (PACSLAC) and Pain Assessment in Advanced Dementia Scale (PAINAD).

Background: There is currently no gold standard instrument for assessing pain in severely cognitively impaired adults who are unable to provide self-report.

Aims: To determine interrater reliability of the PACSLAC and PAINAD in assessing pain behaviors in patients with the same pain stimulus, determine the consistency of the reliable changes between and within the instruments and assess nurse preference for either instrument.

Design: A single-group, within-subjects repeated-measures design was implemented.

Pain in outpatients treated for breast cancer: prevalence, pharmacological treatment, and impact on quality of life.

Background: Cancer pain is an unmitigated clinical phenomenon. Despite available guidelines, variability exists in treating cancer pain.

Objective: The objective of this study was to describe prevalence and severity of pain and the pharmacotherapy (opioid, nonopioid, adjuvant analgesics) in outpatients treated for breast cancer.

Fatigue and disrupted sleep-wake patterns in patients with cancer: a shared mechanism.

The strong and potentially reciprocal relationship between cancer-related fatigue (CRF) and disrupted sleep-wake patterns suggests a possible shared physiologic pathway. A growing body of evidence supports this and shows that abnormalities in the 24-hour rhythm of stress-related hormones may be related to chronic fatigue and sleep disturbances. Aberrations in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the primary neuroendocrine interface responding to stress, induce important biologic and behavioral consequences.