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Surgery is supposed to relieve pain from injury or disease, but new research finds that between 5 percent and 10 percent of patients don’t find pain relief after an operation, and they can experience chronic pain for many months afterward.

In a new study, researchers from Germany and Denmark tried to find out what makes some people more vulnerable to post-op pain than others. They studied 463 adult men who were about to undergo surgery to repair groin hernias and followed them after their operations.

After six months, 16 percent of patients who underwent open surgery and 8 percent of patients who had laparoscopic surgery reported pain that affected their daily activities, the researchers found.

“Through our analysis, we found that persistent pain could be predicted by pain impairment of daily activities before surgery, high pain response to heat stimulation, high pain intensity reports 30 days after surgery and signs of nerve injury,” study co-author Dr. Henrik Kehlet, of Copenhagen University, said in a news release from the American Society of Anesthesiologists.

Other factors — age, anxiety, depression, other pain problems and body mass index — weren’t linked to pain after the operations, the study authors noted.

“These findings prove that persistent pain following surgery is related to both surgical and patient-specific factors, suggesting that patients with high pain response before surgery should be operated laparoscopically — a procedure that is less likely to inflict nerve damage and resulting further pain development,” Kehlet said.

Kehlet is referring to laparoscopic procedures using glue fixation of mesh. The other procedure is called open Lichetenstein mesh repair — open sutured mesh repair — and men who underwent it had a higher rate of persistent pain.

The study findings were scheduled to be presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, in New Orleans.

Nerve stem cell transplants may help slow the progression of macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in the developed world, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said putting nerve stem cells from StemCells Inc near the retinas of rats with a form of macular degeneration helped keep the disease from advancing to blindness for several months.

“These cells improve the chemical environment in the back of the eye,” said Ray Lund of the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, whose findings were presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.

Lund said the mechanism is not clear, but he suspects that when immature nerve cells are placed near the retina, they produce growth factors that protect the cells from damage by the disease.

“It’s basically a chemical pump that is sitting in the right place and producing the right things,” Lund said in a telephone interview.

Where normally animals with eye disease lost their vision by three months old, rats that got the transplants kept their vision for at least seven months, he said.

“There is no evidence that they (the transplanted cells) do any damage,” Lund said, adding that the animals do not develop tumors, a key worry for stem cell transplants.

The findings raise hope for use of the treatment in humans with a range of diseases in which the retina become damaged, including age-related macular degeneration or AMD, which affects nearly 30 million people worldwide, including 15 million Americans.

People with AMD lose central vision when delicate light-sensing cells of the macula, a region at the center of the retina, become damaged.

In the rats, the researchers transplanted immature nerve cells into the space near the retina. Lund said the same could be done in people with retinal disease.

Dr. Stephen Huhn, head of the Central Nervous System research program at StemCells Inc, said the cells are adult neural stem cells. He said they are multipotent, meaning they can morph into different types of nerve cells.

The company has already tested the treatment in a study of six patients with Batten’s disease, a fatal inherited disorder of the nervous system.

“Having a cell that has already entered clinical testing that has been well tolerated at very high doses in the brain gives us a lot of confidence about exploring the same type of strategy in the eye,” Huhn said.

Huhn said he thinks the cells may be especially well suited for use in the retina, brain and spinal cord, which are less likely to reject the cells than other parts of the body.

Ultimately, he said the hope is to develop a treatment for the dry form of macular degeneration, which affects around 90 percent of patients diagnosed with AMD. No treatments are available for this form of the disease.

Huhn said treating this form of the disease may prevent some people from developing wet AMD, in which tiny new blood vessels grow between the retina and the back of the eye.

This form of the disease can be treated with modern drugs like Lucentis, from Novartis and Roche’s Genentech, and Pfizer’s Macugen.

Old-fashioned, common-sense advice to just relax may actually work to help some women get pregnant, doctors reported on Monday.

For years women seeking to get pregnant have been advised by friends and family to stop stressing about it — an idea that not all obstetricians and gynecologists have embraced.

But research presented at a meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Atlanta suggests there may be something to it.

Alice Domar, who runs a fertility center in Boston and also works at Harvard Medical School, found that women who took part in a stress management program while having a second round of assisted fertility treatment had a 160 percent greater pregnancy rate than women getting IVF alone.

“Reproductive health experts have long wondered about the impact that stress may have on fertility, thus impeding a woman’s ability to conceive,” Domar said in a statement.

“This study shows that stress management may improve pregnancy rates, minimizing the stress of fertility management itself, improving the success rates of IVF procedures, and ultimately, helping to alleviate the emotional burden for women who are facing challenges trying to conceive.”

She and colleagues randomly assigned 97 patients at the clinic to take part in a 10-session mind/body program while undergoing in-vitro fertilization treatments.

The program had no effect on how many women conceived during the first try, Domar told the meeting, with 43 percent of the women getting pregnant.

But for women who failed the first time and were having a second try, 52 percent who took part in the mind/body program became pregnant, compared to only 20 percent of those who did not.

“It’s clear based on this carefully designed study, that a holistic approach to infertility care leads to better outcomes for patients,” said Dr. R. Dale McClure, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

But a second study found that while complementary and alternative medical therapy was popular among couples getting infertility treatments, it did not make women any more likely to get pregnant.

A team at the University of California, San Francisco questioned 431 couples undergoing infertility therapy and found that 28 percent had tried some kind of alternative medicine, mostly acupuncture or herbs, but they were not any more likely to achieve pregnancy.

Surfing the Internet just might be a way to preserve your mental skills as you age.

Researchers found that older adults who started browsing the Web experienced improved brain function after only a few days.

“You can teach an old brain new technology tricks,” said Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatry professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of iBrain. With people who had little Internet experience, “we found that after just a week of practice, there was a much greater extent of activity particularly in the areas of the brain that make decisions, the thinking brain — which makes sense because, when you’re searching online, you’re making a lot of decisions,” he said. “It’s interactive.”

Small is co-author of the research, which was scheduled to be presented Monday in Chicago at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting.

“This makes intuitive sense, that getting on the Internet and exploring and getting new information and learning would help,” said Paul Sanberg, director of the University of South Florida Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair in Tampa. “It supports the value of exploring the Internet for the elderly.”

Most experts now advocate a “use-it-or-lose-it” approach to mental functioning.

“We found a number of years ago that people who engaged in cognitive activities had better functioning and perspective than those who did not,” said Dr. Richard Lipton, a professor of neurology and epidemiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and director of the Einstein Aging Study. “Our study is often referenced as the crossword-puzzle study — that doing puzzles, writing for pleasure, playing chess and engaging in a broader array of cognitive activities seem to protect against age-related decline in cognitive function and also dementia.”

The new study takes the use-it-or-lose-it concept into the 21st century.

For the research, 24 neurologically normal adults, aged 55 to 78, were asked to surf the Internet while hooked up to an MRI machine. Before the study began, half the participants had used the Internet daily, and the other half had little experience with it.

After an initial MRI scan, the participants were instructed to do Internet searches for an hour on each of seven days in the next two weeks. They then returned to the clinic for more brain scans.

“At baseline, those with prior Internet experience showed a much greater extent of brain activation,” Small said.

After at-home practice, however, those who had just been introduced to the Internet were catching up to those who were old hands, the study found.

“This is a demonstration that, over a relatively short period of time, patterns of brain activation while engaging in cognitive activities change,” Lipton said. “That is at least a first step toward gaining insight into the mechanisms that might allow cognitive engagement to influence brain function.”

But, Small said, beware how you use the Internet.