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Over the last years, heavy ethanol consumption by teenagers/younger adults has increased considerably among females. However, few studies have addressed the long-term impact on brain structures’ morphology and function of chronic exposure to high ethanol doses from adolescence to adulthood in females. In line with this idea, in the current study we investigated whether heavy chronic ethanol exposure during adolescence to adulthood may induce motor impairments and morphological and cellular alterations in the cerebellum of female rats. Adolescent female Wistar rats (35 days old) were treated with distilled water or ethanol (6.5 g/kg/day, 22.5% w/v) during 55 days by gavage. At 90 days of age, motor function of animals was assessed using open field (OF), pole, beam walking and rotarod tests. Following completion of behavioral tests, morphological and immunohistochemical analyses of the cerebellum were performed. Chronic ethanol exposure impaired significantly motor performance of female rats, inducing spontaneous locomotor activity deficits, bradykinesia, incoordination and motor learning disruption. Moreover, histological analysis revealed that ethanol exposure induced atrophy and neuronal loss in the cerebellum. These findings indicate that heavy ethanol exposure during adolescence is associated with long-lasting cerebellar degeneration and motor impairments in female rats.

Objective: This study aims to describe the discrepancies found through medication reconciliation performed by a clinical pharmacist in pediatric patients admitted to an oncology public hospital. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out in a North Brazilian oncology public hospital. Patients aged 0 – 19 years old with any cancer diagnosis and/or stage were interviewed by a clinical pharmacist within 24 hours of hospital admission about their current medication use in order to develop an updated list to be compared with the medical prescription. Medication discrepancies were classified according the medication discrepancy taxonomy (MedTax). Results: One hundred and sixty-seven patients were screened for eligibility criteria. Of those, 160 patients were included in this study, with a mean age of 7.2±4.2 years old; 58.2% were boys, taking a mean of 3.0±1.3 drugs, and the most frequent primary diagnosis presented were leukemias (46.9%) and malignant bone tumors (12.5%). One hundred and twenty discrepancies were identified, of which 92.0% were unintentional discrepancies. Among them, 72.7% classified as omission, followed by frequency and/or number of units of dosage form and/or total daily dose (16.2%), duration or length of therapy (7.2%), and drug duplication (3.9%). Ondansetron (37.3%) was the drug more involved in these discrepancies. Conclusion: This study presented high unintentional discrepancies between the updated medication list and the medical prescription in pediatric patients with cancer, most of which classified such as inclusion. Our findings showed the importance of the clinical pharmacist to minimize medication errors in these patients.

Psychoactive substances during pregnancy and lactation is a key problem in contemporary society, causing social, economic, and health disturbance. In 2010, about 30 million people used opioid analgesics for non-therapeutic purposes, and the prevalence of opioids use during pregnancy ranged from 1% to 21%, representing a public health problem. This study aimed to evaluate the long-lasting neurobehavioral and nociceptive consequences in adult offspring rats and mice exposed to morphine during intrauterine/lactation periods. Pregnant rats and mice were exposed subcutaneously to morphine (10 mg/kg/day) during 42 consecutive days (from the first day of pregnancy until the last day of lactation). Offspring were weighed on post-natal days (PND) 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, and 60, and behavioral tasks (experiment 1) or nociceptive responses (experiment 2) were assessed at 75 days of age (adult life). Morphine-exposed female rats displayed increased spontaneous locomotor activity. More importantly, both males and female rats perinatally exposed to morphine displayed anxiety- and depressive-like behaviors. Morphine-exposed mice presented alterations in the nociceptive responses on the writhing test. This study showed that sex difference plays a role in pain threshold and that deleterious effects of morphine during pre/perinatal periods are nonrepairable in adulthood, which highlights the long-lasting clinical consequences related to anxiety, depression, and nociceptive disorders in adulthood followed by intrauterine and lactation morphine exposure.

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