Current medical research and opinion
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Meta Analysis
Characterizing and understanding body weight patterns in patients treated with pregabalin.
We examined patterns of weight change among patients treated with pregabalin for up to 1 year. ⋯ The majority of patients treated with pregabalin (150-600 mg/day) for 1 year maintained weight within ±7% baseline weight. One in six patients gained ≥7% weight from baseline, and generally exceeded 7%, 2-12 months after treatment onset.
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Diclofenac potassium liquid-filled soft gelatin capsule (DPSGC; Zipsor*) is a novel formulation of diclofenac potassium used to treat mild to moderate acute pain. ⋯ DPSGC provided significantly greater improvements in pain compared with placebo following bunionectomy, regardless of patients' baseline pain level.
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Review Meta Analysis
Systematic review of efficacy and safety of buprenorphine versus fentanyl or morphine in patients with chronic moderate to severe pain.
To systematically assess efficacy and safety of buprenorphine patch versus fentanyl patch in patients with chronic moderate to severe pain. ⋯ The findings indicate comparability of transdermal buprenorphine and transdermal fentanyl for pain measures with significantly fewer adverse events (nausea and treatment discontinuation due to adverse events) caused by transdermal buprenorphine.
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Previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses of treatments in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) derived their findings from either placebo-controlled studies only or separately from head-to-head and comparative studies. The purpose of this study is to compare annualized relapse rates (ARR) of fingolimod versus all of the commonly used first-line treatments in RRMS using evidence from both placebo-controlled and head-to-head studies. In absence of the head-to-head data between fingolimod and the other treatments, these comparisons were formed using meta-analysis techniques for indirect treatment comparisons. ⋯ Our study demonstrated that fingolimod significantly reduces relapse frequency in patients with RRMS compared with current first-line disease-modifying therapies.
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Meta Analysis
The effects of statin on atrial fibrillation: a meta-analysis of published data from randomized controlled trials.
Some clinical and experimental studies have shown the use of statins could protect against AF, but there are not adequate data at present. ⋯ Our meta-analysis suggests that the use of statins may be associated with preventing AF in short term trials and long term trials, but in the long term trials of more intensive versus standard statin, there was no evidence of a reduction in the risk of AF. However, we still need large-scale randomized double blind statin trials with AF occurrence as the main endpoint in order to finally confirm the benefits of statin in AF patients.