Pain in the Blood? Envisioning Mechanism-Based Diagnoses and Biomarkers in Clinical Pain Medicine

Overview

Journal Diagnostics (Basel)

Specialty Radiology

Date 2016 Feb 9

PMID 26854144

Citations 13

Authors

Emmanuel Backryd

Affiliations

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Abstract

Chronic pain is highly prevalent, and pain medicine lacks objective biomarkers to guide diagnosis and choice of treatment. The current U.S. "opioid epidemic" is a reminder of the paucity of effective and safe treatment options. Traditional pain diagnoses according to the International Classification of Diseases are often unspecific, and analgesics are often prescribed on a trial-and-error basis. In contrast to this current state of affairs, the vision of future mechanism-based diagnoses of chronic pain conditions is presented in this non-technical paper, focusing on the need for biomarkers and the theoretical complexity of the task. Pain is and will remain a subjective experience, and as such is not objectively measurable. Therefore, the concept of "noci-marker" is presented as an alternative to "pain biomarker", the goal being to find objective, measurable correlates of the pathophysiological processes involved in different chronic pain conditions. This vision entails a call for more translational pain research in order to bridge the gap between clinical pain medicine and preclinical science.

Citing Articles

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Eleven neurology-related proteins measured in serum are positively correlated to the severity of diabetic neuropathy.

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