Mice smell, share each other's pain | Science News
Pain is contagious, at least for mice. After encountering bedding where mice in pain had slept, other mice became more sensitive to pain themselves. The experiment, described online October 19 in Science Advances, shows that pain can move from one animal to another — no injury or illness required.The results"add to a growing body of research showing that animals communicate distress and are affected by the distress of others," says neuroscientist Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal of the University of California, Berkeley.Neuroscientist Andrey Ryabinin and colleagues didn't set out to study pain transfer. But the researc...
Source: Psychology of Pain - October 26, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
How drugs intended for patients ended up in the hands of illegal users: ‘No one was doing their job’ - The Washington Post
For 10 years, the government waged a behind-the-scenes war against pharmaceutical companies that hardly anyone knows: wholesale distributors of prescription narcotics that ship drugs from manufacturers to consumers.The Drug Enforcement Administration targeted these middlemen for a simple reason. If the agency could force the companies to police their own drug shipments, it could keep millions of pills out of the hands of abusers and dealers. That would be much more effective than fighting"diversion" of legal painkillers at each drugstore and pain clinic.Many companies held back drugs and alerted the DEA to signs ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - October 24, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
The First Fentanyl Addict | VICE
If the opiate crisis has taught us anything, it's that addiction affects everyone. An unprecedented surge in fentanyl-implicated death —across all incomes and backgrounds, obviously—has sparked public health emergencies across the US and Canada. With each fentanyl overdose reported, we're seeing ignorant assumptions about who uses drugs and why finally put to rest.But there was a time when fentanyl was almost exclusively used by a very small group, and it had nothing to do with Margaret Wente's idea of a"typical drug addict" or poverty or organized crime. What the general public is oblivious to â€...
Source: Psychology of Pain - October 24, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Mice smell, share each other's pain | Science News
Pain is contagious, at least for mice. After encountering bedding where mice in pain had slept, other mice became more sensitive to pain themselves. The experiment, described online October 19 in Science Advances, shows that pain can move from one animal to another — no injury or illness required.The results"add to a growing body of research showing that animals communicate distress and are affected by the distress of others," says neuroscientist Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal of the University of California, Berkeley.Neuroscientist Andrey Ryabinin and colleagues didn't set out to study pain transfer. But the researc...
Source: Psychology of Pain - October 22, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
He ate a pepper so hot it tore a hole in his esophagus - The Washington Post
A ghost pepper's heat is described in terms normally reserved for carpet bombings. Its heat is measured at 1 million units on the Scoville scale, a per-mass measure of capsaicin — the chemical compound that imbues peppers with heat — that until recently was a world record. Peppers that pass the 1 million mark are called superhot; as a rule they are reddish and puckered, as though one of Satan's internal organs had prolapsed. To daredevil eaters of a certain stripe, the superhot peppers exist only to challenge.When consumed, ghost peppers and other superhots provoke extreme reactions."Your body thinks it...
Source: Psychology of Pain - October 20, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Tramadol: The Opioid Crisis for the Rest of the World - WSJ
GAROUA, Cameroon —Not long ago, a Dutch neurobiologist announced a surprising discovery: A root used by rural West African healers to treat pain contains an apparently natural version of a man-made opioid.The root from northern Cameroon had such high levels of a painkiller called tramadol that mice given an extract and placed on a hot plate didn't feel their feet burning at first.A year later, German rivals came up with a different explanation for the unusual plant. Inexpensive, imported tramadol is so heavily abused in northern Cameroon that it seeps from human and animal waste into the groundwater and soil, where v...
Source: Psychology of Pain - October 20, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
The shocking pain of American men - The Washington Post
Once upon a time, nearly every man in America worked. In 1948, the labor-force participation rate was a staggering 96.7 percent among men in their prime working years.That statistic has been steadily declining ever since. Today, about 11.5 percent of men between the ages of 24-54 are neither employed nor looking for a job. Economists say that these people are"out of the labor force" — and they don't figure into statistics like the unemployment rate.This demographic trend has been the subject of much noise and consternation lately. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the conservative American Enterprise Ins...
Source: Psychology of Pain - October 13, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
How naked mole rats conquered pain —and what it could mean for us | Science | AAAS
This study points us to important areas … that might be targeted to reduce this type of pain."Naked mole rats are just plain weird. They live almost totally underground in coloniesstructured like honey bee hives, with hundreds of workers servicing a single queen and her few consorts. To survive, they dig kilometers of tunnels in search of large underground tubers for food. It's such a tough life that —to conserve energy—this member of the rodent family gave up regulating its temperature, and they are able to thrive in a low-oxygen, high–carbon dioxide environment that would suffocate or be very painful to ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - October 12, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Lancet Global Burden of Disease Highlights Back Pain - The Atlantic
The newest iteration of the Global Burden of Disease study, which tracks the prevalence of deaths and diseases worldwide, contains some good news: On average people are living about a decade longer than they were in 1980. But there's a catch: Health hasn't improved as fast as life expectancy overall, which means that for many, those long, final years are spent hobbled by illness and disability.The nature of our old-age ailments has changed in recent years. The study, published this week in The Lancet and conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, uses a metric call...
Source: Psychology of Pain - October 8, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Committee on Pain Management and Regulatory Strategies to Address Prescription Opioid Abuse - National Academy of Sciences
An ad hoc committee will develop a report to inform the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as to the state of the science regarding prescription opioid abuse and misuse, including prevention, management, and intervention, and to provide an update from the 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research, including a further characterization of the evolving role that opioid analgesics play in pain management. The report additionally will make recommendations on the options available to FDA to address the prescription opioid overdos...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 19, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
All Pain Is Not Equal - RELIEF: PAIN RESEARCH NEWS, INSIGHTS AND IDEAS
Thirty-one-year-old Less Henderson recently returned from a week-long hospital stay after her lung collapsed due to endometriosis, a reproductive disease in which the lining of the uterus grows in other parts of the body, causing pain. Though endometriosis usually only affects the pelvic area, in rare cases like Henderson ' s it can spread further, causing serious and potentially fatal complications.While Henderson ' s collapsed lung was addressed quickly and she is now on the mend, she has not always been as fortunate in the health care she ' s received. Henderson —who is both black and working class—struggled for yea...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 10, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
National Pain Strategy - NIH
The objectives of the National Pain Strategy aim to decrease the prevalence of pain across its continuum from acute to high-impact chronic pain and its associated morbidity and disability across the lifespan. The intent is to reduce the burden of pain for individuals, their families, and society as a whole.More ...https://iprcc.nih.gov/docs/HHSNational_Pain_Strategy.pdf (Source: Psychology of Pain)
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 3, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
NIH Pain Consortium - Pain Information Brochures
The National Institutes of Health consists of many different institutes and centers. The following is an index to various NIH publications about pain symptoms, conditions and treatments.https://painconsortium.nih.gov/News_Other_Resources/pain_index.html (Source: Psychology of Pain)
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 3, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
The Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (IPRCC)
is a Federal advisory committee created by the Department of Health and Human Services to enhance pain research efforts and promote collaboration across the government, with the ultimate goals of advancing the fundamental understanding of pain and improving pain-related treatment strategies.https://iprcc.nih.gov/index.htm (Source: Psychology of Pain)
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 3, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
About the Pain Special Interest Group | NCCIH
The PAIN Special Interest Group (PAIN SIG) is comprised of investigators from a number of different institutes and centers at the NIH that are interested in the neurobiological mechanisms underlying pain. Our group is moderated by Drs. Yarimar Carrasquillo, Alex Chesler, and Lauren Chesler and includes students, postdocs, postbacs, staff, investigators, and clinicians. Research areas of interest span from molecular and cellular studies in model systems to clinical studies in both healthy individuals and pain patients. Our goal is to provide a forum where researchers from different backgrounds can openly exchange their idea...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 3, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
