The Clinical journal of pain
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Staircase-evoked Pain may be More Sensitive than Traditional Pain Assessments in Discriminating Analgesic Effects: A Randomized, Placebo-controlled Trial of Naproxen in Patients with Osteoarthritis of the Knee.
Analgesic trials often fail to show a significant effect even when medications with known efficacy are tested. This could be attributed to insufficient assay sensitivity of analgesic trials, which may be due, in part, to the insensitivity of pain-related outcome measures. The aim of this methodological study was to assess the responsiveness of evoked pain generated by the staircase procedure compared with other commonly used pain outcomes in knee osteoarthritis. ⋯ Study results support our hypothesis that evoked pain using the StEPP may demonstrate greater responsiveness to treatment effects compared with traditional pain-related outcome measures. Accordingly, these results may facilitate development and validation of other chronic pain-related evoked pain models, which could contribute to future research and development of new analgesics.