Expanding Role of NMDA Receptor Antagonists in the Management of Pain.

Pain management is complex regardless of whether the pain is acute or chronic in nature or non-cancer or cancer related. In addition, relatively few pain pharmacotherapy options with adequate efficacy and safety data currently exist. Consequently, interest in the role of NMDA receptor antagonists as a pharmacological pain management strategy has surfaced.

Adjusted inference procedures for the interobserver agreement in twin studies.

We propose adjusted inference procedures for evaluating the agreement/disagreement of two raters in a clustered setting involving twins or paired body parts. These procedures include the construction of a confidence interval for the kappa statistic, a related test of statistical significance and a formula that facilitates sample size estimation. The results of a simulation study suggest that a simple adjustment using an estimated design effect will provide valid inferences.