Pain practice : the official journal of World Institute of Pain
-
Vagally mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV) is widely respected as a psychophysiological measure of emotion regulation capacity and serves as a readily available index of executive brain areas that exert an inhibitory influence on subcortical structures. Pain catastrophizing (PC) is conceptualized as the tendency to misinterpret and exaggerate pain-related situations that may be threatening. Chronic pain patients show lower vmHRV and higher PC. ⋯ Patients with WAD showed lower vmHRV, indexed by high-frequency HRV (effect size, Cohen's d = 0.442), and greater PC (d = 0.815). Zero-order and partial correlations controlling for age and sex revealed that vmHRV and PC are inversely related. The results provide evidence for a psychophysiological mechanism underlying PC, in particular in chronic pain patients.
-
Patients with persistent somatoform pain disorder (PSPD) suffer from long-term pain and emotional conflicts. Recently, accumulating evidence indicated that emotion has a significant role in pain perception of somatoform pain disorder. ⋯ Moreover, patients with PSPD consistently showed hyperactivities in the prefrontal, the fusiform gyrus and the insula in response to negative stimuli under pinprick pain vs. non-pain condition. The current findings provide some insights into the underlying relationship between emotion and pain-related brain activity in patients with PSPD, which is of both theoretical and clinical importance.
-
Pain is a prevailing feature of cervical dystonia (CD), the most common form of focal dystonia. This analysis examined pain relief after onabotulinumtoxinA treatment in CD subjects with moderate/severe pain from the Cervical Dystonia Patient Registry for Observation of OnabotulinumtoxinA Efficacy (CD PROBE). ⋯ Results from this real-world clinical registry indicate that a majority of CD subjects with moderate/severe neck pain experience significant relief following onabotulinumtoxinA treatment.
-
Smokers with fibromyalgia have greater pain intensity and function impairment compared to nonsmokers. Patients' perceptions of interactions between smoking and fibromyalgia symptoms have not been described. The primary aim of this study was to report the perceptions of female smokers with fibromyalgia on how smoking affects symptoms. ⋯ Smokers with fibromyalgia reported smoking helped to cope with fibromyalgia pain but generally did not directly ameliorate fibromyalgia physical symptoms.
-
To evaluate the safety and efficacy of gabapentin in comparison with carbamazepine in the treatment of trigeminal neuralgia, a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials was performed. Two reviewers independently selected studies, assessed study quality, and extracted data. Sixteen randomized controlled trials that included 1,331 patients were assessed. ⋯ Furthermore, our meta-analysis suggested that the adverse reaction rate of gabapentin therapy group was significantly lower than that of carbamazepine therapy group (OR = 0.312, 95% CI 0.240, 0.407, P < 0.001). In conclusion, present trials comparing gabapentin with carbamazepine are all poor in terms of methodological quality. Based on the available evidence, it is not possible to draw conclusions regarding the efficacy and side effects of gabapentin being superior to carbamazepine.