Pain
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Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) measurement aims to capture the complete, subjective health state of the patients and to comprehensively evaluate treatment outcomes. The aim of this study was to assess, using the 15D HRQoL instrument, HRQoL in a sample of 1528 chronic pain patients, referred to the multidisciplinary pain clinic of the Helsinki University Hospital during 2004 to 2012. The 15D results of the chronic pain patients were compared with those of a matched general population. ⋯ The results indicate heavy perceived burden of illness in chronic pain patients. In light of the questions analysed, 15D appears sensitive and discriminative in chronic pain patients in tertiary care. Instead of pain intensity, the impaired HRQoL in chronic pain was mainly because of the psychosocial aspects of pain.
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There is significant interest in the potential of Internet-delivered pain management programs for adults with chronic pain. Understanding the characteristics of people who do and do not benefit from Internet-delivered programs will help to guide their safe and effective use. Using a large sample from a previous randomised controlled trial of an established Internet-delivered pain management program, the Pain Course, this study (n = 463) examined whether several demographic, clinical, psychological, and treatment-related variables could be used to predict clinical response in levels of disability, depression, anxiety, or average pain. ⋯ However, no particularly decisive or dominant predictors emerged that were common across time points or across the outcome domains. Reflecting this, the identified predictors explained only 18.1%, 13.7%, 7.6%, and 9.5% of the variance in the likelihood of making a clinical improvement in disability, depression, anxiety, and average pain levels, respectively. The current findings suggest that a broad range of patients may benefit from emerging Internet-delivered pain management programs and that it may not be possible to predict who will or will not benefit on the basis of patients' demographic, clinical, and psychological characteristics.
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Nociceptive long-term potentiation, a use dependent increase in synaptic efficacy in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord is thought to contribute to the development of persistent pain states. So far, no study has analyzed the effects of high-frequency stimulation (HFS) of afferents from deep tissues (muscle and fascia) on pain perception in the back in humans. In 16 healthy volunteers, the multifidus muscle and the overlying thoracolumbar fascia were stimulated with electrical high-frequency pulses (5 × 100 pulses at 100 Hz) through bipolar concentric needle electrodes placed at lumbar level (L3/L4). ⋯ The HFS in muscle had no significant effect on muscle pain, but decreased pain sensitivity of the overlying fascia by 20% (P < 0.05). In additional experiments using the same electrodes and followed over >60 minutes post-HFS, potentiation by fascia HFS was similar to that of skin HFS. These findings show that the spinal input from the fascia can induce long-term changes in pain sensitivity for at least 60 minutes making it a candidate potentially contributing to nonspecific low back pain.
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Pain disrupts attention, which may have negative consequences for daily life for people with acute or chronic pain. It has been suggested that switching between tasks may leave us particularly susceptible to pain-related attentional disruption, because we need to disengage our attention from one task before shifting it onto another. Switching tasks typically elicit lower accuracies and/or longer reaction times when participants switch to a new task compared with repeating the same task, and pain may exacerbate this effect. ⋯ In studies 2 and 3, we also investigated the effects of type of pain, duration of pain, and analgesics on task performance. We conclude that pain has a small dampening effect on performance overall on switching tasks. This suggests that pain interrupts attention even when participants are engaged in a trial, not only when attention has been disengaged for shifting to a new task set.
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Pain modulates rhythmic neuronal activity recorded by Electroencephalography (EEG) in humans. Our laboratory previously showed that rat models of acute and neuropathic pain manifest increased power in primary somatosensory cortex (S1) recorded by electrocorticography (ECoG). In this study, we hypothesized that pain increases EEG power and corticocortical coherence in different rat models of pain, whereas treatments with clinically effective analgesics reverse these changes. ⋯ Electroencephalography power is not affected by ibuprofen in the acute pain model. However, pregabalin and mexiletine reverse the changes in power and S1-PFC coherence in the inflammatory and neuropathic pain models. These data suggest that quantitative EEG might be a valuable predictor of pain and analgesia in rodents.