ABSTRACT
A migraine is a clinical diagnosis with a presentation of one or more severe unilateral or bilateral headache(s) often preceded by an aura and typically accompanied by nausea, vomiting, photophobia, and/or phonophobia. This neurological disease is often debilitating and greatly affects the quality of life of those it inflicts. In fact, a recent study conducted by the Global Burden of Disease and published in The Lancet Neurology revealed that migraines ranked second to only back pain as the most disabling disease. Triggers for migraines have ranged from female sex, low socioeconomic status, and diet to loud noises, sleep hygiene, and stress. Along with its clinical presentation, laboratory tests and imaging help rule out other potential causes of the headache and lead to a diagnosis of migraine. Migraines are typically divided into three phases: prodromal, headache, and postdrome. The pathophysiology of each phase remains under investigation, with differing theories regarding their pathways. Existing therapies are abortive therapies for acute migraines or preventative therapies. Abortive therapy consists of NSAIDs and triptans. Preventative therapies include tricyclic antidepressants, calcium channel blockers, beta-blockers, and anticonvulsants. In this review, we focus on the role of NSAIDs and the COX-2 inhibitor, celecoxib oral solution, for the abortive treatment of acute migraines.
ABSTRACT
The self-assembly of colloidal particles using DNA linker molecules has led to novel colloidal materials. This article describes the development and characterization of a new class of colloidal structures based on the directed assembly of DNA-linked paramagnetic particles. A key obstacle to assembling these structures is understanding the fundamental chemistry and physics of the assembly processes. The stability of these cross-linked chain structures is the first step toward reliable assembly and thus important for its applications; however, chain stability has yet to be systematically studied. In this paper, we investigate both theoretically and experimentally, the stability of DNA-linked paramagnetic colloidal chains as a function of externally applied magnetic field strength and surface grafted DNA length and density. A total interparticle free energy potential model is developed accounting for all major forces contributing to chain stability, and a phase diagram is obtained from experiments to illustrate linked chain phases, unstable unlinked particle phases, and their transitions, which agree well with those predicted by the model. From this study, optimized parameters for successful linking and building stable linked chains are obtained.
