Stanford Study Finds Migraine Patients Treated with OnabotA tend to Elect Extended Treatment

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Leon S. Moskatel, MD
Clinical Assistant Professor
Division of Headache, Department of Neurology
Stanford University
Palo Alto, CA

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: OnabotulinumtoxinA (onabotA) is one of the most effective and well-tolerated treatments for chronic migraine, which the FDA approved for the prevention of chronic migraine in 2010.

OnabotA for chronic migraine is usually administered according to the PREEMPT protocol every 12 weeks for at least 3 treatments. Previous studies examining the long-term use of onabotA have been limited by either relatively short duration or small sample size. At the Stanford Headache Center, we were able to query our electronic medical records and create a prescription database to examine long-term persistence to onabotA over 11 years, between 2011-2021.

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Frequent Musculoskeletal Pain Linked to Early Retirement

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Dr Nils Niederstrasser
Senior Lecturer
Department of Psychology
University of Portsmouth

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: The number of people living with musculoskeletal pain increases with age, but few studies have specifically focused on the effects of chronic pain on the employment status of older populations.

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Study Finds Reduced Pain and Fatigue with Exercise in Patients with Metastatic Breast Cancer

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Dr Anouk Hiensch PhD
Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care
University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University
Utrecht, The Netherlands

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: Patients with metastatic breast cancer (mBC) often experience cancer- and treatment-related side effects that can impair daily life activities and health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Interventions are needed that improve HRQoL by alleviating fatigue and other side effects during metastatic BC cancer treatment. Recent evidence-based international guidelines (ASCO, ACSM) recommend exercise for patients with BC during adjuvant treatment for reducing side effects. However, evidence of the effectiveness of exercise in patients with mBC is scarce. The PREFERABLE-EFFECT study (NCT04120298) was designed to assess the effects of a 9-month supervised exercise program in patients with mBC on fatigue, HRQoL, and other cancer- and treatment-related side effects.

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Virgina Tech Study Demonstrates Focused Brain Ultrasound Can Reduce Both Pain Perception and Response to Pain

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Wynn Legon, Ph.D.
Assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and in the
School of Neuroscience in Virginia Tech’s College of Science.
The Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, located in Roanoke, Virginia, is a top-level research institute of Virginia Tech.

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: My lab is focused on identifying new indications for which low-intensity focused ultrasound, or LIFU, might provide a benefit. In particular, we are focused on the insula and dorsal anterior cingulate, areas deep inside the brain implicated in a range of conditions. Chronic pain is among these.

These two papers provide proof-of-principle to confirm that focused ultrasound energy applied to these regions can impact both the perception of pain and the body’s reaction to a painful stimulus. Participants in the studies reported a reduction in perceived pain that depended on which site was targeted. Further, the application of low-intensity focused ultrasound also reduced physical responses to pain as measured by heart rate variability, again depending on which site was targeted.

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Socially Disadvantaged Women Received Fewer Epidurals for Pain Relief During Childbirth

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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr Lucy Halliday
School of Medicine, Dentistry and Nursing
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

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MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: Socioeconomic deprivation is associated with adverse maternal and childhood outcomes. Epidural analgesia is the gold standard for labour analgesia, and is associated with improved maternal pain scores and satisfaction, reduced rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and postnatal depression and may reduce severe maternal morbidity. Scotland is a country with a fully publicly funded national health service that aims to provide equitable treatment that is free at the point of care. We wanted to look at the association between socioeconomic deprivation and utilisation of labour epidural analgesia.

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Migraines: IPhones Allow Monitoring of Sleep, Eating and Mood Triggers

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Kathleen R. Merikangas, Ph.D.
NIH Distinguished Investigator
Chief of the Genetic Epidemiology Research Branch
Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health
Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: We have been studying differences in patterns of migraine in males and females and how it changes across the life span. We focus on recruiting people from the general community rather than those who come to clinical settings who tend to have more severe cases of headaches. This allows us to gather information that can generalize to the community.  We have taken advantage of the widespread use of mobile phones to administer assessments of physical and mental health in real time naturalistic settings.

The question that we addressed in this paper was whether we could identify changes in mental or physical health that may be related to the onset of headache on the next day. identifying potential triggers of headache attacks can help us to avoid them when possible, to intervene as early as possible in the progression of headache attacks, and to gain insight into the underlying biologic and environmental factors involved in migraine.

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Neuropathy: Repeated High Concentration Capsaicin Patches Provided Back Pain Relief and Reduced Need for Opioids

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Kai-Uwe Kern MD, PhD
Institute of Pain Medicine/Pain Practice
Wiesbaden, Germany

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: In recent studies a progressive response to high-concentration capsaicin patch (HCCP) with repeated treatment was observed, meaning that patients with insufficient pain relief after the first application of HCCP, still may respond to a second, third, or even fourth application. Based on these latest findings, and also on my personal clinical experience, we aimed to systematically analyse the pool of patients in my Pain Practice with at least two HCCP treatments.

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NCCIH Study Finds Marked Increase in Complementary Health Approaches Among US Adults, Including for Pain Management

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Richard L. Nahin, Ph.D., M.P.H
Lead Epidemiologist
National Center for Complementary and Integration Health
NCCIH

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: Millions of US adults use complementary health approaches (CHAs) each year. CHAs are health approaches typically not part of conventional medical care or with origins outside of Western medicine that are used together with conventional medical practice.

Some of the most well-known complementary health approaches include meditation, acupuncture, and yoga. While the safety and efficacy of many of these approaches previously lacked rigorous clinical trials, the last two decades saw an increase in evidence supporting the use of select approaches to manage health and pain.

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Back Pain: Study Analyzes Course of Acute, Subacute and Chronic Low Back Pain

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Prof. Lorimer Moseley PhD
DSc, FAAHMS, FACP, HonFFPMANZCA, HonMAPA, BAppSc(Phty)(Hons)
Professor of Clinical Neurosciences
Foundation Chair in Physiotherapy
University of South Australia 
Chair of PainAdelaide Stakeholders’ Consortium

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: 12 years ago, members of our group gathered all the research studies that had followed people with back pain for a year and used all the combined data to get an idea of how well people with back pain do. That big study concluded that if you have had back pain for less than 6 weeks, you were highly likely to do really well and that if you had back pain for more than 6 weeks, things were still likely to go pretty well. That made us think ’so why do so many people have chronic back pain?’

Perhaps, by lumping sub-acute back pain (6-12 weeks) in with chronic back pain (>12 weeks) that study 12 years ago made outcomes for people with over 12 weeks of back pain look better than they really were. We decided to repeat that big study from 12 years ago but because there were likely to be many more research studies, we decided to divide the participants into three groups: those with back pain for less than 6 weeks, those with back pain for 6-12 weeks and those with back pain for more than 12 weeks. 

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Multiple Sclerosis: Widespread Pain with Nociplastic Features (WPNF) Linked to Low Physical Activity

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Libak Abou PhD, MPT
Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation
Michigan Medicine
Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: Chronic pain is a common symptom experienced by persons with multiple sclerosis (MS) that affects their daily living functioning including physical activity. Growing evidence indicates that persons with MS may experience various types of chronic pain including widespread pain with nociplastic features (WPNF), nociceptive pain, and/or neuropathic pain. WPNF is a chronic and diffuse pain which can be challenging to localize or describe precisely. In person with multiple sclerosis, this type of pain arises from altered processing signals within the central nervous system. This is opposed to pain that arises from specific tissue damage, classified as nociceptive pain, or pain related to demyelination and axonal damage, classified as neuropathic pain.

Our main goal with this study was to investigate whether differences exists on the level of physical activity achieved by persons with MS based on the type of chronic pain they experience

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