Pain Treatment for Prostate Condition

Pain Relief from prostate condition.
               
An experimental treatment is being used to helf with the pain associated with prostate conditions. Urology professor Curtis Nickel leads a study into chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain in men and find that treatment with a selective alpha blocker may relieve symptoms and improve quality of life.
'New findings show that treatment with a specific alpha blocker helps reduce symptoms and improve quality of life for men with chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS).

The alpha-blocker, known as silodosin, works by selectively relaxing the muscles in the bladder neck and prostate. The treatment is already approved in Canada, the United States, the EU and Japan to treat painful symptoms of another prostate gland condition, benign prostatic hyperplasia, commonly referred to as an enlarged prostate.

Despite being the most common form of prostatitis, CP/CPPS is the most misunderstood and difficult to treat because the symptoms are very similar to other conditions and requires a significant degree of testing and screening to identify.

"Antibiotics are commonly used as a treatment, but are not typically effective, probably because CP/CPPS does not seem to be caused by a bacterial infection," explains lead researcher Curtis Nickel, a professor in the Department of Urology, practicing urologist at Kingston General Hospital, and Canada Research Chair in Urologic Pain and Inflammation.

CP/CPPS is a debilitating condition characterized by persistent discomfort in the lower pelvic area including the bladder area, testicles, and penis. Symptoms can be severe and include painful and frequent urination and difficult or painful ejaculation. The cause of the condition is unknown.

In Dr. Nickel's study, approximately 60 per cent of men reported feeling better after treatment with silodosin versus 30 per cent of participants who were given a placebo. The number of patients who reported feeling better is higher than in a similar study he ran several years ago that tested the effects of a different alpha blocker.

Dr. Nickel, along with his Prostatitis Research Group at Kingston General Hospital and Queen's University, has been studying CP/CPPS for the past two decades. He has been the principal investigator of over a dozen international clinical trials evaluating therapies for chronic prostatitis. His research studies are supported by the Canadian Institute of Health Research, US National Institutes of Health and industry, including Watson Pharmaceuticals who provided the support for this particular clinical trial.

Dr. Nickel presented his results at today's American Urological Association annual meeting in Washington DC. The study results will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Urology.

Things to do when you dislocate your shoulder.

Dislocated Shoulder Treatment

Here is an article about things to do with a dislocated shoulder.  Info Sports Injury Blog

What should you do when you suffer a dislocated shoulder?
Firstly you should prevent further damage by protecting the shoulder joint eg using a sling.  Get to a trained medical professional so that it can be put back in (reduced).  Don’t try and put it back in by yourself as you can... read more what to do with a dislocated shoulder

Pain Clinic Open-Sydney-Back Treatments

Longy Nguyen has opened a new pain clinic in Sydney.  For more than forty years Longy has been treating people from around the world for back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain and many other common injuries. Read more about Longys Pain Clinic and a back treatment for an NRL captain.

Cannabis may be able to Kill the Pain without getting 'stoned'.

Cannabis to Stop the Pain

Great if it could get rib of that pain.  Here is a great article that may lead the way to using the recreational drug cannabis for pain treatment.

By Andy Coghlan April 2011

An ingenious set of experiments has teased apart the mind-altering and pain-relieving effects of the main component of cannabis. This could open the way to cannabis-like drugs that provide pain relief without causing unwanted highs.

Cannabis is taken as a painkiller – to dull pain in cancer for example – but it can produce unpleasant side effects such as hallucinations and impaired mobility.

Now, a team led by Li Zhang of the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Maryland, has shown that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the active component in cannabis that makes people high but that is also thought to dull pain – binds to different molecular targets on cells to produce these two effects.

It has long been known that THC gives people a high by binding to a molecular anchor on cells called the cannabinoid type-1 (CB1) receptor. Zhang and his team discovered that THC relieves pain by binding instead to receptors for the brain-signalling compound glycine and increasing their activity.

Through experiments on mice, they then confirmed that if the glycine receptor is absent or if its activity is blocked by another drug, the animals experienced pain in a standard "tail-flick" test even when given THC, confirming that the drug's pain-relief and psychotropic effects can be decoupled.

Target receptor

"We found that this glycine receptor could be a primary target for developing non-psychoactive forms of cannabis," says Lhang.

"This is an important breakthrough in the long-sought separation of intoxicant effects of THC from its desired medical effects," says Les Iversen at the University of Oxford in the UK, who studies the effects of marijuana.

However, Stephen Wright, director of research and development for GW Pharmaceuticals in Porton Down, UK, thinks that there are other ways that cannabis-based medicines may be able to provide pain relief without the side effects. Last year the firm launched a cannabis-based medicine in Europe called Sativex to dampen painful muscle spasms in patients with multiple sclerosis.

Wright says that no persistent psychotic effects have been seen with the product, partly because it is released into the body 20 to 40 times more slowly than THC is released when cannabis is smoked. As well as THC, GW's preparation contains cannabidiol, a component of marijuana thought to dampen psychotic reactions to THC.

No psychotic effects been seen in the US, where Sativex is being trialled to combat pain in cancer patients.

Canadian Medical Association Journal