Parents detected pain in their children yet provided few doses of analgesics. Parents may benefit from interventions that provide them with information that addresses individual barriers regarding assessing and treating pain.

Summary:Voltage-gated calcium channels (VGCC) play obligatory roles in diverse physiological functions. Pathological conditions leading to changes in their biophysical properties and expression levels may cause malfunctions of VGCC-mediated activities, resulting in disease states. It is believed that changes in VGCC properties under pain-inducing conditions may play a causal role in the development of chronic pain, including nerve injury-induced pain or neuropathic pain. For the past several decades, preclinical and clinical research in developing VGCC blockers or modulators for chronic pain management has been fruitful, leading to some U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs currently available for chronic pain management. However, their efficacy in pain relief is limited in some patients, and their long-term use is limited by their side-effect profiles. Certainly, there is room for improvement in developing more subtype-specific VGCC blockers or modulators for chronic pain conditions. In this review, we summarized the most recent preclinical and clinical studies related to chronic pain medications acting on the VGCC. We also included clinical trials aiming to expand the application of approved VGCC drugs to different pain states derived from various pathological conditions, as well as drug combination therapies trying to improve the efficacies and side-effect profiles of current pain medications.

Background Application of pulsed radiofrequency (PRF) currents to the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) has been reported to produce relief from certain pain states without causing thermal ablation. In this study, we examined the direct correlation between PRF application to DRG associated with spinal nerve injury and reversal of injury-induced behavioral hypersensitivity in a rat neuropathic pain model. Methods Neuropathic lesioning was performed via left L5 spinal nerve ligation on male adult Sprague-Dawley rats. Once the injured rats had developed tactile allodynia, one group was then assigned to PRF treatment of the L5 DRG and another group was assigned to the sham treatment to the DRG. Behavioral testing was performed on both the control and treated paws using the von Frey filament test before the surgery and at indicated days. The resulting data were analyzed using a linear mixed model to assess the overall difference between the treatment groups and the overall difference among the study days. Cohen’s d statistic was computed from paired difference-from-baseline scores for each of the 14 study days after treatment and these measures of effect-size were then used to descriptively compare the recovery patterns over time for each study group. Results Spinal nerve injury resulted in the development of behavioral hypersensitivity to von Frey filament stimulation (allodynia) in the hindpaw of the left (injury) side. Mixed Linear modeling showed a significant difference between the treatment groups (p = 0.0079) and a significant change of paw withdrawal threshold means over time (p = 0.0006) for all 12 animals. Evaluation of Cohen’s d (effect size) revealed that the PRF-treated animals exhibited better recovery and recorded larger effect-sizes than the sham-treated animals on 10 of the 14 post-PRF treatment days and exhibited moderate to strong effects posttreatment at days 8–10 and at and beyond day 32. Conclusions Findings from this study support that PRF of the DRG causes reversal of nerve injury (spinal nerve ligation)-induced tactile allodynia in rats. This allodynia reversal indicates that nonablative PRF acting via modulation of the DRG can speed recovery in nerve injury-induced pain.

Background In this investigation, we sought to assess the ability of pediatric attending anesthesiologists, resident anesthesiologists and mothers to predict anxiety during induction of anesthesia in 2 to 16-year-old children (n=125). Methods Anesthesiologists and mothers provided predictions using a visual analog scale and children's anxiety was assessed using a valid behavior observation tool the Modified Yale Preoperative Anxiety Scale (mYPAS). All mothers were present during anesthetic induction and no child received sedative premedication. Correlational analyses were conducted. Results A total of 125 children aged 2 to 16 years, their mothers, and their attending pediatric anesthesiologists and resident anesthesiologists were studied. Correlational analyses revealed significant associations between attending predictions and child anxiety at induction (rs= 0.38, p<0.001). Resident anesthesiologist and mother predictions were not significantly related to children's anxiety during induction (rs = 0.01 and 0.001, respectively). In terms of accuracy of prediction, 47.2% of predictions made by attending anesthesiologists were within one standard deviation of the observed anxiety exhibited by the child, and 70.4% of predictions were within 2 standard deviations. Conclusions We conclude that attending anesthesiologists who practice in pediatric settings are better than mothers in predicting the anxiety of children during induction of anesthesia. While this finding has significant clinical implications, it is unclear if it can be extended to attending anesthesiologists whose practice is not mostly pediatric anesthesia.

The use of Hemisync sounds before and during general anesthesia reduces intraoperative analgesic requirements, postoperative pain scores, and discharge time.