Quality of life before and after lung transplantation in patients with emphysema versus other indications.

Whether lung transplantation improves Health-related Quality of Life in patients with emphysema and other end-stage lung diseases before and after lung transplantation was examined. Between 1992 and 1999, 23 patients with emphysema and 19 patients with other indications completed self-administered questionnaires before lung transplantation, and at 4, 7, 13, and 25 mo. after transplantation.

Perineural antinociceptive effect of opioids in a rat model.

Background: The research on conductive analgesia induced by perineural opioids generated a large body of conflicting data. In this study we reassessed the antinociceptive response to perineural administration of morphine, fentanyl or meperidine in a rat model.

Methods: Analgesia was assessed using the hind paw withdrawal latency (HPWL) response to radiant heat.

Changing doctor prescribing behaviour.

The aim of this overview was to identify interventions that change doctor prescribing behaviour and to derive conclusions for practice and further research. Relevant studies (indicating prescribing as a behaviour change) were located from a database of studies maintained by the Cochrane Collaboration on Effective Professional Practice. This register is kept up to date by searching the following databases for reports of relevant research: DHSS-DATA; EMBASE; MEDLINE; SIGLE; Resource Database in Continuing Medical Education (1975-1994), along with bibliographies of related topics, hand searching of key journals and personal contact with content area experts.

Evaluation of the discriminatory power of typing methods for Neisseria gonorrhoeae.

A panel of 18 strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, known to be temporally and geographically diverse, was used to evaluate a number of typing systems, including conventional auxotyping and serotyping and the molecular methods of arbitrarily primed PCR (AP-PCR), amplified ribosomal-DNA restriction analysis (ARDRA), opa typing, and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). The discriminatory power of the different typing methods were determined with a collection of 87 clinical isolates from commercial sex workers in Indonesia, and Simpson's index of diversity was calculated. Of the two traditional techniques, auxotyping and serotyping, the latter gives the highest discriminatory index (DI) (DI, 0.

Irritancy testing of sodium laurate and other anionic detergents using an open exposure model.

Background/aims: The irritant potency of soap (sodium laurate, LAU) as opposed to other anionic detergents is not uniformly agreed upon. The aim of the study was to compare the irritancy of sodium laurate with that of sodium laurylsulphate (SLS), sodium cocoyl isethionate and disodium lauryl 3-ethoxysulphosuc-cinate by means of a 4-day repeated open exposure model in order to achieve a more realistic mimicry of daily practice.

Methods: The effects of the exposures were evaluated by: a) number of fulfilled exposures, b) visual score after exposures, and c) transepidermal water loss (TEWL) after exposures.

Prolonged analgesia and decreased toxicity with liposomal morphine in a mouse model.

Inadequate control of postoperative pain remains a major clinical problem. A reliable method of providing long-lasting postoperative analgesia with a single dose would be very useful. We synthesized a liposomal morphine formulation and compared it to free morphine with regard to duration of analgesia in the mouse.

Prolonged analgesia with liposomal bupivacaine in a mouse model.

Background And Objectives: Currently available local anesthetics have relatively limited duration of action and some may cause severe systemic toxicity. An ultralong lasting local anesthetic would be useful to produce prolonged intraoperative anesthesia and extended postoperative analgesia. The goal of this study was to synthesize a sustained release local anesthetic formulation that would produce prolonged sensory block and decrease the possibility of systemic toxicity.

Assessing local anesthetic effect using the mouse tail flick test.

We used the tail flick test to quantify duration of local anesthetic-induced conduction block in the mouse. Using a baseline tail flick latency (TFL) between 1.0 and 2.

A rat sciatic nerve model for independent assessment of sensory and motor block induced by local anesthetics.

The purpose of this study was to develop a reliable model to independently quantify motor and sensory block produced by local anesthetics. The sciatic nerve was blocked in 52 rats by injecting 0.2 mL of 0.