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Chronic pain has become a significant medical issue. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF) is a broadband psychological test that has been validated for use across various medical settings and can aid in the assessment and treatment planning of chronic pain. In the current investigation, it was hypothesized that the somatic complaints scales of the MMPI-2-RF would demonstrate good convergent validity from a structured psychodiagnostic interview and other measures of pain and somatization, and lack gender bias. Patients (n = 200) who produced valid MMPI-2-RFs in an outpatient chronic pain clinic were included in the study. Patients were also administered the Modified Somatic Perception Questionnaire (MSPQ), Pain Disability Index (PDI), and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV-TR (SCID). Zero-order and partial correlations (controlling for gender) were calculated between MMPI-2-RF scale scores and other criteria. Stepdown hierarchical regression analyses were used to detect bias. By and large, higher scale scores on the somatic/cognitive scales of the MMPI-2-RF were modestly or substantially correlated with MSPQ scores, PDI scores, and SCID Somatization symptom count, even after controlling for gender. Regression analyses suggested that the MMPI-2-RF scale scores were not biased as a function of gender. These findings support the validity of specific MMPI-2-RF scales to help identify somatization and psychosocial functioning among patients with chronic pain. Identification of somatization early within the course of treatment of chronic pain may help focus treatment targets, including referrals for psychological interventions such as cognitive behavior therapy for chronic pain., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.)

Psychopathology has been associated with patient reports of poor outcome and an algorithm has been useful in predicting short-term outcomes. The objective of this study is to investigate whether a pre-surgical psychological algorithm could predict 1-year spine surgery outcome reports, including pain, functional disability, and emotional functioning. A total of 1,099 patients consented to participate. All patients underwent spine surgery (e.g., spinal fusion, discectomy, etc.). Pre-operatively, patients completed self-report measures prior to surgery. An algorithm predicting patient prognosis based on data from the pre-surgical psychological evaluation was filled out by the provider for each patient prior to surgery. Post-operatively, patients completed self-report measures at 3- and 12-months after surgery. Longitudinal latent class growth analysis (LCGA) was used to derive patient outcome groups. These outcome groups were then compared to pre-surgical predictions made. LCGA analyses derived three groups of patients from the reported outcome data (entropy = .84): excellent outcomes, good outcomes, and poor outcomes. The excellent and good groups demonstrated improvements over time, but the poor outcome groups, on some measures, reported worsening of pain, functional disability, and emotional functioning over time. The pre-surgical algorithm yielded good concordance with the statistically derived outcome groups (Kendall's W = .81). Using a pre-surgical psychological evaluation algorithm for predicting long-term spine surgery outcomes can identify patients who are unlikely to report good outcomes, and point to areas for psychological intervention that can either improve surgery results or to be utilized as alternatives to elective spine surgery. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychopathology among liver and kidney transplant patients is prevalent. Although pre-surgical psychological evaluations are routinely conducted, understanding which specific psychological test to use is under-developed. The purpose of this review is to examine the psychometric properties of broadband and narrowband psychological measures in pre-surgical liver and kidney transplant evaluations. Overall, there is a paucity of research in this domain that hamper abilities to make clear recommendations on what to use alongside a clinical interview. This review highlights the need for additional research examining instruments that may predict patients' successful recovery from transplant surgery. Despite the scarcity of research, instruments that appear to be useful in this population include the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2), the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), the Stanford Integrated Psychosocial Assessment for Transplantation (SIPAT), and the Transplant Evaluation and Rating Scale (TERS).

Tissue plasminogen activator (t-PA) is the only FDA-approved drug for acute ischemic stroke but poses risk for hemorrhagic transformation (HT). Cell therapy has been investigated as a potential therapy to improve recovery after stroke by the modulation of inflammatory responses and the improvement of blood-brain barrier (BBB) integrity, both of which are associated with HT after t-PA. In our present study, we studied the effect of autologous bone marrow mononuclear cells (MNCs) in an embolic stroke model. We administered MNCs in a rat embolic stroke 2 h after administering t-PA. We observed that even though autologous MNCs did not alter the incidence of HT, they decreased the severity of HT and reduced BBB permeability. One possible mechanism could be through the inhibition of MMP3 released by astrocytes via JAK/STAT pathway as shown by our in vitro cell interaction studies.

The Morris water maze is routinely used to explore neurobiological mechanisms of working memory. Humans can often acquire working memory relevant to performing a task by mere sensory observation, without having to actually perform the task followed by reinforcement. This can be modeled in the water maze through direct placement of a rat on the escape platform so that it can observe the location, and then assessing the subject's performance in swimming back to the platform. However, direct placement procedures have hardly been studied for two decades, reflecting a controversy about whether direct placement resulted in sufficiently rapid and direct swims back to the platform. In the present study, utilizing revised training methods, a more comprehensive measure of trajectory directness, a more rigorous sham-trained control procedure and an optimal placement-test interval, rats swam almost directly back to the platform in under 4s, significantly more quickly and directly than sham-trained subjects. Muscarinic cholinergic mechanisms, which are inactivated by scopolamine, are essential to memory for standard learning paradigms in the water maze. This experiment determined whether this would also be true for latent learning. ANOVA revealed significant negative effects of scopolamine on both speed and accuracy of trajectory, as well as significant positive effects of direct placement training vs. sham-training. In a probe trial, placement-trained animals without scopolamine spent significantly more time and path length in the target quadrant than trained rats with scopolamine and sham-trained rats without scopolamine. Scopolamine impairments are likely due to effects on memory, since the same dose had little effect on performance with a visible platform. The revised direct placement model offers a means of further comparing the neural mechanisms of latent learning with those of standard instrumental learning., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Neuropeptide FF (NPFF) modulates opiate actions. It has pro-nociceptive effects, primarily through the NPFF receptor 1 subtype, and anti-nociceptive effects, primarily through the NPFFR2 subtype. AC-263093 is a small l, organic, systemically active molecule that was previously shown to functionally activate NPFFR2, but not NPFFR1. It was hypothesized that AC-263093 would attenuate morphine tolerance. Rats were tested for radiant heat tail-flick latency before and after 5 mg/kg morphine sulfate s.c. They were then rendered morphine-tolerant by continuous subcutaneous infusion of 17.52 mg/kg/day morphine sulfate. On the seventh day of infusion, they were retested for analgesia 10 and 20 min after 5mg/kg morphine sulfate s.c. Tolerance was indicated by reduction of morphine analgesia from the pre-infusion test. Fifty minutes prior to morphine challenge, rats received either 10 mg/kg i.p. AC-263093 or injection vehicle alone. AC-2623093-treated rats had far smaller tolerance scores than control rats. This drug effect was significant, p = 0.015. The same dose of AC-263093 had almost no analgesic effect in non-tolerant, saline-infused rats. In vitro experiments revealed that AC-263093 had equal affinity for NPFFR1 and NPFFR2, and functionally inactivated NPFFR1, in addition to its previously shown ability to activate NPFFR2. Thus, altering the balance between activation of NPFF receptor subtypes may provide one approach to reversing opiate tolerance., (Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.. All rights reserved.)