The strong opioid painkiller, tramadol, is not that effective at easing chronic pain for which it’s widely prescribed, finds a pooled data analysis of the available research, published online in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine.

And it likely increases the risk of serious side effects, including heart disease, the findings indicate, prompting the researchers to conclude that the potential harms of tramadol probably outweigh its benefits, and that its use should be minimised.

Abdominal pain is a hallmark of many digestive disorders, including inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome. In an effort to develop targeted treatments for gut pain, scientists have discovered a new enzyme in gut bacteria and are using nanoparticles to deliver drugs inside cells.

Currently, there are no treatments specifically for gut pain, and existing painkillers are often insufficient at managing symptoms.

Researchers at McMaster University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made two scientific breakthroughs at once: they not only discovered a brand-new antibiotic that targets inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), but also successfully used a new type of AI to predict exactly how the drug works. To their knowledge, this a global first for the AI.

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease is the most common liver disease in the world, affecting about one third of the adult population. This disorder is characterized by the accumulation of fat in liver cells, which has severe liver consequences and is also associated with a high mortality rate from cardiovascular disease.​​​​​

When a patient enters the emergency department in critical condition, doctors must quickly run through a crucial list of questions: Does the patient have an infection? If so, is it bacterial or viral? Do they require treatment? Can the patient recover at home safely or do they need to be hospitalized?

Even when an infection is diagnosed, the treatment plan isn’t always clear.

The research, led by Dr André Brown and the Behavioural Phenomics group at the LMS, was published last week in BMC Biology. It represents a step toward solving a major challenge in medicine: how to develop treatments for the thousands of rare genetic diseases that currently have none. The work builds on a previous study published earlier this year in eLife, and together they mark a shift in how we can model these diseases and test potential treatments at scale.

Breast cancer survivors with severe menopausal symptoms should be supported to make an informed decision about whether to have hormone replacement therapy or not, according to an interdisciplinary panel of experts including researchers from UCL.

The study, published in Menopause, provides the most comprehensive review to date on the use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), also known as menopausal hormone therapy (MHT), in women who have been treated for breast cancer.