Articles: chronic.
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Internal medicine journal · Nov 2022
Real World Opioid Prescription To Patients With Serious, Non-Malignant, Respiratory Illnesses And Chronic Breathlessness.
Chronic breathlessness is a disabling symptom that is often under-recognised and challenging to treat despite optimal disease-directed therapy. Low-dose, oral opioids are recommended to relieve breathlessness, but little is known regarding long-term opioid prescription in this setting. ⋯ Within this integrated respiratory and palliative care service, patients with severe, non-malignant respiratory diseases safely used long-term, low-dose opioids for breathlessness with subjective benefits reported and no serious adverse events.
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Synovial inflammation has known contributions to chronic osteoarthritis (OA) pain, but the potential role in transitions from early to late stages of OA pain is unclear. ⋯ Using a slow progressing surgical model of osteoarthritis we show how the changing balance between local and systemic inflammation may be of importance in the progression of pain behaviours during the transition to chronic osteoarthritis pain.
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A 52-year-old man came to the cardiac surgery clinic for pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE) evaluation. He had initially appeared at an outside hospital 1 year earlier, with chest pain and shortness of breath. He had no known chronic conditions. ⋯ His anticoagulation was transitioned to enoxaparin for presumed apixaban treatment failure, and an investigation for hypercoagulable conditions was initiated. His lupus anticoagulant test result was positive, but he did not meet the criteria for antiphospholipid syndrome because he was negative for anticardiolipin and β2-glycoprotein antibodies. Assays for antithrombin III, protein C, prothrombin gene, and factor V Leiden mutations produced normal results.
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A 17-year-old girl received lung transplantation after chronic respiratory failure. She developed a fever (> 38 °C) once or twice weekly starting 2 months after surgery, and multiple papulopustules on the skin waxed and waned for 4 months. She then developed blood-tinged sputum. She had been treated with triple immunosuppressants, including prednisolone, tacrolimus, and mycophenolate mofetil after lung transplantation, and her symptoms appeared during prednisolone dose reduction.