The Handoff: Your Week in Pain News – 2/10/17

The Handoff is a weekly roundup of news related to pain management covering developments in clinical research, pharmaceuticals, guidelines for pain management, as well as initiatives to address the opioid epidemic, and technologies for pain. Keep your finger on the pulse of pain research with The Handoff.

According to a meta-analysis and systematic review published in Pain Research and Treatment, aromatherapy may represent an effective adjunctive treatment for pain management, in particular, for postoperative, gynecological, obstetrical, nociceptive, and acute pain.

A majority of pediatric low back pain cases have a musculoskeletal etiology and no identifiable “pain generator.”

Acupuncture was found to provide beneficial effects for neck and low back musculoskeletal pain, knee osteoarthritis, headache, and migraine, according to a pairwise meta-analysis of 18,000 individual patient data.

Additional imaging of common foot and ankle injuries may prevent misdiagnosis and long-term disability, including chronic pain and arthritis.

Alterations in early life reward processing in the dorsal striatum may affect pain responses, in part due to polymorphism in the µ-opioid receptor gene, OPRM1.

Enrichment of the fecal microbiome of patients with inflammatory bowel disease with IgA-coated E. coli was found to promote TH-17-dependent inflammation, leading to spondyloarthritis.

Ethanol combined with oxycodone was found to exacerbate respiratory depression, particularly in the elderly.