Recent findings suggest that pain and pleasure share common neurochemical circuits, and studies in animals and humans show that opioid-mediated descending pathways can inhibit or facilitate pain. We explored the role of endogenous opioid neurotransmission in pleasure-related analgesia. μ-Opioidergic activity was blocked with 0.2 mg/kg naloxone to assess its effects on hedonic responses to pleas...

Opioids have been successfully used for the management of acute and cancer-related pain. Concerns regarding side effects, tolerance, dependence, addiction, and hyperalgesia have limited the use of opioids for the management of chronic nonmalignant pain. This article will review updated information from both clinical and preclinical studies regarding opioid-induced hyperalgesia, tolerance, and d...

Adjuvant drugs that attenuate or inhibit the development of tolerance to morphine may lead to improved management of pain in chronic diseases such as cancer. The aim of this study was to investigate effect of fluoxetine, a specific 5-HT (5-hydroxytryptamine, serotonin) reuptake inhibitor, on tolerance induced to the analgesic effect of morphine in mice with skin cancer. The study was carried ou...

BACKGROUND Pain tolerance is subject to considerable inter-individual variation, which may be influenced by a number of genetic and non-genetic factors. The mu, delta and kappa opioid receptors play a role in pain perception and are thought to mediate different pain modalities. The aim of this study was to explore associations between pain thresholds and gender and genetic variants in the three...

STUDY DESIGN A prospective cohort. PURPOSE To report the short and long term outcomes of fluoroscopically guided lumbar transforaminal epidural steroid injection (TFESI) in degenerative lumbar spondylolisthesis (DLS) patients. OVERVIEW OF LITERATURE TFESI has been widely used for the treatment of lumbosacral radicular pains. However, to our knowledge, there has been no study which has evalu...

This study compares the effect of an acceptance-based protocol (ACT) and a cognitive control-based (CONT) protocol on three measures of pain coping: tolerance, self-report, and believability. Specific methodological controls were employed to further isolate the role of the value of participating in a pain task, compared to previous investigations on the alteration of the function of aversive st...

BACKGROUND Vaso-occlusive pain crises (VOCs) are the "hallmark" of sickle-cell disease (SCD) and can lead to sympathetic nervous system dysfunction. Increased sympathetic nervous system activation during VOCs and/or pain can result in vasoconstriction, which may increase the risk for subsequent VOCs and pain. Hypnosis is a neuromodulatory intervention that may attenuate vascular and pain respon...

OBJECTIVE This study examined whether increasing the demand for central cognitive processing involved in a distraction task, by involving the child in ongoing, effortful interaction with the distraction stimulus, would increase children's tolerance for cold pressor pain. METHODS Seventy-nine children ages 6-15 years underwent a baseline cold pressor trial followed by two cold pressor trials i...