BACKGROUND Increases in prescriptions of opioid medications for chronic pain have been accompanied by increases in opioid overdoses, abuse, and other harms and uncertainty about long-term effectiveness. PURPOSE To evaluate evidence on the effectiveness and harms of long-term (>3 months) opioid therapy for chronic pain in adults. DATA SOURCES MEDLINE, the Cochrane Central Register of Control...

Our study investigates the role of infrastructures in shaping online news usage by contrasting use patterns of two social groups—millennials and boomers—that are specifically located in news infrastructures. Typically based on self-reported data, popular press and academics tend to highlight the generational gap in news usage and link it to divergence in values and preferences of the two age co...

This paper describes a tool that enables instructors to select, visualize and mine students’ usage data in Moodle courses. The tool has been developed in PHP language and integrated in Moodle as a block.

The purpose of the present study was to examine correlates of polypharmacy among underserved community-dwelling older African American adults. Methods. This study recruited 400 underserved older African Americans adults living in South Los Angeles. The structured face-to-face interviews collected data on participants' characteristics and elicited data pertaining to the type, frequency, dosage, ...

Introduction: The neuroprotective role of opioid morphine against 6-hydroxydopamineinduced cell death has been demonstrated. However, the exact mechanism(s) underlying such neuroprotection, especially the role of subtype receptors, has not yet been fully clarified. Methods: Here, we investigated the effects of different opioid agonists on 6-OHDA-induced neurotoxicity in human neuroblastoma...

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the effect of opioid-independent, heterologous activation of protein kinase C (PKC) on the responsiveness of opioid receptor and the underlying molecular mechanisms. Our result showed that removing the C terminus of d opioid receptor (DOR) containing six Ser/Thr residues abolished both DPDPEand phorbol 12-myristate 13acetate (PMA)-induced DOR p...

This topic review will discuss the clinical features and management of opioid withdrawal in the emergency setting. A summary table to facilitate emergent management is provided (table 1). Discussions of opioid withdrawal during detoxification treatment, opioid intoxication, opioid withdrawal in neonates, and general management of the poisoned patient are found elsewhere. (See "Medically supervi...

AIM To compare the effects of neurolytic celiac plexus block (NCPB) and videothoracoscopic splanchnicectomy (VSPL) on pain and quality of life of chronic pancreatitis (CP) patients. METHODS Forty-eight small duct CP patients were treated invasively with NCPB (n = 30) or VSPL (n = 18) in two non-randomized, prospective, case-controlled protocols due to chronic pain syndrome, and compared to a ...

The study of offender trajectories has been a prolific area of criminological research. However, few studies have incorporated the influence of emerging adulthood, a recently identified stage of the life course, on offending trajectories. The present study addressed this shortcoming by introducing the "prolonged adolescent" offender, a low-level offender between the ages of 18 and 25 that has f...

Since 1952, when Gates determined the stereo structure of morphine, numerous groups have focused on discovering a nonnarcotic opioid drug. Although several natural, semisynthetic, and synthetic opioid ligands (alkaloids and peptides) have been developed in clinical studies, very few were nonnarcotic opioid drugs. One of the most important studies in the opioid field appeared in 1976, when Marti...