Antioxidants Relieve Pain of Chronic Pancreatitis

[HysteryDiagnosis]

http://www.newsmax.com/health/antioxidands_pancreatitis/2009/01/02/167162.html


Antioxidants Relieve Pain of Chronic Pancreatitis

Friday, January 2, 2009 9:31 AM

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Antioxidant supplementation was found to be effective in relieving pain and reducing levels of oxidative stress in patients with chronic pancreatitis (CP), reports a new study in Gastroenterology. CP is a progressive inflammatory disease of the pancreas in which patients experience abdominal pain (in early stage) and diabetes and maldigestion (in late stage). Pain is the major problem in 90 percent of patients with CP and currently, there is no effective medical therapy for pain relief. Gastroenterology is the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute.

In this placebo-controlled, double blind trial, 127 patients, ages 30.5+/-10.5, were assigned to placebo or antioxidant groups. After six months, the reduction in the number of painful days/month was significantly higher in the antioxidant group, compared with the placebo group (7.4±6.8 versus 3.2±4, respectively). The reduction in the number of analgesic tablets/month was also higher in the antioxidant group (10.5±11.8 versus 4.4±5.8, respectively). Furthermore, 32 percent and 13 percent of patients became pain free in the antioxidant and placebo groups, respectively; the beneficial effect of antioxidants on pain relief was noted early at three months.

"Abdominal pain, the predominant symptom in patients with CP, is difficult to treat. The main reason for a largely ineffective medical treatment is that the mechanism of pain in CP is not well understood," said Pramod Kumar Garg, MD, DM, of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi and lead author of the study. "We are encouraged by our findings, as significant improvement was noted with antioxidants in respect to all the parameters of pain in this study. In addition, reduction in pain resulted in fewer man-days lost, thus providing functional employment gain to the patients. The findings should spur further research in this exciting area."

There are two important implications of this study — the fact that measures of oxidative stress were increased initially and decreased subsequently after supplementation with antioxidants suggests that there is a state of heightened free radical mediated injury in CP, and that injury is reversible. Second, with regard to pain management, this trial showed that antioxidant therapy is effective for pain relief in patients with CP. This assumes significance since no effective medical therapy exists for pain relief for such patients.

[grasswire]

1. I wonder how the diagnosis of CP is made

I'd like to know that.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. You have a computer, you can almost know anything.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/460475_5

Diagnosis of Chronic Pancreatitis

Chronic pancreatitis is easily diagnosed when the disease is severe and is characterized by calcifications, diabetes, and malabsorption. In this situation, the result of every imaging test will be abnormal, even the plain abdominal radiograph. The challenge is to diagnose chronic pancreatitis early when abdominal pain is the only symptom and the results of imaging tests (CT, ERCP) are not diagnostic.

Endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) has been claimed to be sensitive to early chronic pancreatitis, when pancreatic exocrine function begins to decline and before other imaging test results are abnormal. The recent report by Kahl et al.<58> illustrates the use of EUS to diagnose "early" chronic pancreatitis. The authors monitored 38 patients with a normal ERCP but EUS signs of chronic pancreatitis for a median of 18 months. Repeat ERCP showed chronic pancreatitis in 68.8% (22 of 38 patients). The authors concluded that EUS is more sensitive than ERCP in detecting early morphologic changes of chronic pancreatitis.