Practical PAIN MANAGEMENT, January/February 2007 ©2007 PPM Communications, Inc. Reprinted with permission. Diagnostic Provocation Discographic Injections Lumbar provocation discography remains a controversial diagnostic technique; and even more so with cervical/ thoracic discography. To appreciate the historical controversy surrounding discography is to understand that its inception was a tenuo...

The conjunctival provocation test (CPT) is a diagnostic procedure for testing airborne allergens causing allergic rhinoconjunctivitis [1,2]. It has been thoroughly evaluated with regard to its precision [3] and compared with nasal provocation tests [4]. Nowadays, the CPT is used for evaluation of allergic rhinoconjunctivitis [5,6] and is accepted by regulatory authorities as an outcome paramete...

BACKGROUND Histamine is detected in high concentrations in the airways during an allergic asthma response. In a murine model of allergic asthma, JNJ 7777120, an antagonist at the histamine H(4) receptor, reduces asthmatic symptoms, while the histamine H(1) receptor-selective antagonist mepyramine is virtually without effect. In the present study, we analyzed the effect of combined antagonism at...

PURPOSE The clinical significance of post-procedural atrial premature beats immediately after catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation (AF) has not been clearly determined. We hypothesized that the provocation of immediate recurrence of atrial premature beats (IRAPB) and additional ablation improves the clinical outcome of AF ablation. MATERIALS AND METHODS We enrolled 200 patients with AF (...

BACKGROUND The value of impulse oscillometry (IOS) for bronchial provocation testing is poorly defined. We investigated the positive threshold derived from the parameters and diagnostic power of IOS for asthma with the leukotriene D(4) bronchial provocation test. METHODS We enrolled 62 subjects with asthma and 21 healthy subjects. IOS was employed to perform the leukotriene D(4) bronchial pro...

Allergic rhinitis is a frequent immunological disease affecting about 10-25% of the total population. The pathogenesis of allergic rhinitis is presumed to involve an IgE-mediated mechanism. Careful patient history, together with the skin prick test or RAST, usually allows an easy diagnosis of allergic rhinitis. In other cases it may be necessary to confirm diagnosis by the nasal provocation tes...

objective: the present study was carried out to examine the efficacy of psychoneurotherapy (pnt) on reducing symptoms severity in treatment-naïve patients with obsessive-compulsive washing. this study evaluated a new form of psychotherapy based on neurobiological model of obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd).  methods: the study was conducted as a quasi-experimental research. the statistical pop...

The symptom-provocation paradigms generally used in neuroimaging studies of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have placed high demands on emotion processing but lacked cognitive processing, thereby limiting the ability to assess alterations in neural systems that subserve executive functions and their interactions with emotion processing. Thirty-nine veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan underw...