People in chronic pain are some of the most difficult patients to treat. They have complex circumstances that medicine can't always remedy. Pain can be amplified, by depression and anxiety, genetics and quality of life. Genetics can also play a role in how people experience pain. Physicians are less prone to prescribe opioid medication to patients with long-term pain - but they need more treatment options.

Men who take once-daily aspirin have nearly double the risk of melanoma compared to men who are not exposed to daily aspirin, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. Women, however, do not have an increased risk in this large patient population. The study was published April 27 in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

A new research study by scientists in Australia and the US provides an explanation for why clinical trials of drugs reducing proteins in the brain that were thought to cause dementia and Alzheimer's have failed. The study has opened the way for potential new treatments with existing drugs. Published online in the journal Human Molecular Genetics, the researchers assembled evidence from a wide range of human studies and animal models of dementia-related diseases to show that inflammation is a major cause, not just a consequence.

Women are underrepresented in clinical trials for heart failure, coronary artery disease and acute coronary syndrome but proportionately or overrepresented in trials for hypertension, atrial fibrillation and pulmonary arterial hypertension, when compared to incidence or prevalence of women within each disease population, according to a study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Cocaine and other drugs of abuse hijack the natural reward circuits in the brain. In part, that's why it's so hard to quit using these substances. Moreover, relapse rates hover between 40 and 60 percent, similar to rates for other chronic conditions like hypertension and Type 1 diabetes. University of Pennsylvania behavioral pharmacologist and neuroscientist Heath Schmidt studies how long-term exposure to drugs such as cocaine, nicotine, and prescription opioids affects the brain and how these changes promote relapse in someone who has kicked the habit.

The rabies virus wreaks havoc on the brain, triggering psychosis and death. To get where it needs to go, the virus must first trick the nervous system and cross the blood brain barrier - a process that makes it of interest in drug design. Now, scientists report in ACS Nano a way to exploit the rabies virus machinery to deliver a Parkinson's disease medication directly to the brain.

Using sunlight for sustainable and cheap production of, for example, medicines. The 'mini-factory' in the form of a leaf that chemical engineers from Eindhoven University of Technology presented in 2016 showed that it is possible. Now the researchers have come with an improved version: their 'mini-factory' is now able to keep production at the same level, irrespective of the variation in sunlight due to cloudiness or time of the day.