Articles: chronic.
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Review
Brain changes associated with cognitive and emotional factors in chronic pain: A systematic review.
An emerging technique in chronic pain research is MRI, which has led to the understanding that chronic pain patients display brain structure and function alterations. Many of these altered brain regions and networks are not just involved in pain processing, but also in other sensory and particularly cognitive tasks. Therefore, the next step is to investigate the relation between brain alterations and pain related cognitive and emotional factors. ⋯ In contrast to pain catastrophizing, evidence on anxiety and depressive symptoms shows no clear association with brain characteristics. However, all included cognitive or emotional factors showed significant associations with resting state fMRI data, providing that even at rest the brain reserves a certain activity for these pain-related factors. Brain changes associated with illness perceptions, pain attention, attitudes and beliefs seem to receive less attention in literature.
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Critical care medicine · May 2017
Multicenter Study Observational StudySerial Procalcitonin Predicts Mortality in Severe Sepsis Patients: Results From the Multicenter Procalcitonin MOnitoring SEpsis (MOSES) Study.
To prospectively validate that the inability to decrease procalcitonin levels by more than 80% between baseline and day 4 is associated with increased 28-day all-cause mortality in a large sepsis patient population recruited across the United States. ⋯ Results of this large, prospective multicenter U.S. study indicate that inability to decrease procalcitonin by more than 80% is a significant independent predictor of mortality and may aid in sepsis care.