Articles: chronic.
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Chronic pain (CP) significantly impacts emotional and physical well-being and overall quality of life across diverse populations in the United States (U.S.). Notably, underrepresented minoritized (URM) groups, such as Hispanic/Latinx youth, may experience disproportionate effects due to health disparities and lack of access to quality healthcare. However, this remains understudied. This study aims to examine the association between CP and its related psychosocial factors- depressive and anxiety symptoms, and pain catastrophizing- in Hispanic/Latinx youth, as compared to Non-Hispanic White (NHW) youth. ⋯ Our results suggested that for NHW youth with CP, greater tendencies toward catastrophizing and experiences of anxiety may more strongly contribute to depressive symptoms, when compared to their Hispanic/Latinx youth counterparts. Further investigation of pain-coping mechanisms among Hispanic/Latinx youth and other youth from historically marginalized populations (e.g., racial/ethnic minoritized groups) will help advance clinical understanding of sociocultural variability in links between pain-related psychosocial outcomes in the CP experience.
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Historically in medicine and beyond, the understanding of and treatment of pain is based on finding tissue injury. The fact that for chronic pain, there often is no (longer) any traceable tissue injury, in combination with the fact that pain essentially is a private experience, poses a challenge for clinical communication. This paper therefore examines how pain is linguistically and interactionally constructed as invisible. ⋯ The discussion explores how on these three levels, notions of the abnormal or deviant body come into play, in which patients and health professionals complexly construct pain both as not normal (i.e. not a neutral or desirable state of being), while, at the same time, the lack of traceable tissue injury is constructed as medically normal for chronic pain. This also shows how patients and healthcare providers often orient to the stigma around chronic pain.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Jan 2025
Multi-Institutional Study of Multimodal Analgesia Practice, Pain Trajectories, and Recovery Trends After Spine Fusion for Idiopathic Scoliosis.
Posterior spinal fusion (PSF) surgery for correction of idiopathic scoliosis is associated with chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP). In this multicenter study, we describe perioperative multimodal analgesic (MMA) management and characterize postoperative pain, disability, and quality of life over 12 months after PSF in adolescents and young adults. ⋯ MMA strategies showed site-specific variability and decreasing yearly trends of in-hospital opioid use without changes in acute or chronic pain after PSF. There was a high incidence of persistent pain associated with disability and poor quality of life warrants postoperative surveillance to enable functional recovery.
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Pharmacological ablation of rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM) mu opioid receptor-expressing cells before peripheral nerve injury prevents the development of neuropathic pain. However, whether these neurons are required for the expression of established neuropathic pain is not known. Male Oprm1Cre heterozygous (MOR Cre ) or wild-type (MOR WT ) mice received AAV8-hSyn-DIO-hM4D(Gi)-mCherry in the RVM. ⋯ Sustained CNO in drinking water before PSNL prevented expression of chronic pain without affecting acute surgical pain; however, relief of chronic pain required sustained CNO treatment. Thus, in male mice, activity of spinally projecting RVM-MOR cells is required (1) for expression and manifestation of both sensory and affective dimensions of established neuropathic pain and (2) to promote descending facilitation that overcomes apparently intact descending inhibition to maintain chronic pain. Enhanced descending facilitation likely regulates the output signal from the spinal cord to the brain to shape the pain experience and may provide a mechanism for nonopioid management of pain.
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Chronic pain is known to be an important construct in clinical practice and a particular form of chronic pain, high-impact chronic pain (HICP), has gained recent interest and attention by pain clinicians, epidemiologists, and clinical researchers. The purpose of our Topical Review is to describe the historical development of measures of HICP and to explore the psychometric properties of HICP as well as to present alternative measurement methods. ⋯ This work takes the position that current methods of measuring high impact chronic pain (HICP) likely contain substantial error. We have endorsed an alternative approach for several psychometrically grounded reasons. We recommend that future work consider the discrete latent variable framework for dichotomous measures of HICP and the continuous latent variable framework for continuous measures of HICP. The paper provides illustrative examples of these methods for a different patient reported measure that is lacking a gold standard, much like HICP measures.