Lidocaine Infusions for Pain Management in Pediatrics.

Lidocaine is an amino amide with a well-established role as a local anesthetic agent. Systemic intravenous administration expands its clinical use to include acute and chronic pain circumstances, such as postoperative pain, neuropathic pain, postherpetic neuralgia, hyperalgesia, visceral pain, and centrally mediated pain. For refractory pain that has not responded to conventional therapy or if further escalation of treatment is prevented by contraindications or side effects to standard therapies, a continuous infusion of lidocaine may be considered as a single intervention or as a sequence of infusions. Here, we review and evaluate published data reflecting the use of lidocaine continuous infusions for pain management in the pediatric population.

A chelating dendritic ligand capped quantum dot: preparation, surface passivation, bioconjugation and specific DNA detection.

Herein we report the synthesis of a new chelating dendritic ligand (CDL) and its use in the preparation a compact, stable and water-soluble quantum dot (QD), and further development of specific DNA sensor. The CDL, which contains a chelative dihydrolipoic acid moiety for strong QD surface anchoring and four dendritic carboxylic acid groups, provides a stable, compact and entangled hydrophilic coating around the QD that significantly increases the stability of the resulting water-soluble QD. A CDL-capped CdSe/ZnS core/shell QD (CDL-QD) has stronger fluorescence than that capped by a monodendate single-chain thiol, 3-mercapto-propionic acid (MPA-QD). In addition, the fluorescence of the CDL-QD can be enhanced by 2.5-fold by treatments with Zn2+ or S2- ions, presumably due to effective passivation of the surface defects. This level of fluorescence enhancement obtained for the CDL-QD is much greater than that for the MPA-QD. Further, by coupling a short single-stranded DNA target to the QD via the CDL carboxylic acid group, a functional QD-DNA conjugate that can resist non-specific adsorption and hybridize quickly to its complementary DNA probe has been obtained. This functional QD-DNA conjugate is suitable for specific quantification of short, labelled complementary probes at the low DNA probe:QD copy numbers via a QD-sensitised dye fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) response with 500 pM sensitivity on a conventional fluorimeter.