Imagined Examples of Painful Experiences Provided by Chronic Low Back Pain Patients and Attributed a Pain Numerical Rating Score

Overview

Journal Front Neurosci

Date 2020 Mar 3

PMID 32116483

Citations 1

Authors

Robert S Griffin

Maria Antoniak

Phuong Dinh Mac

Vladimir Kramskiy

Seth Waldman

David Mimno

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Objective: The pain numerical rating scale (NRS) is widely used in pain research and clinical settings to represent pain intensity. For an individual with chronic pain, NRS reporting requires representation of a complex subjective state as a numeral. To evaluate the process of NRS reporting, this study examined the relationship between reported pain NRS levels and imagined painful events reported by study subjects.

Design: A total of 149 subjects with chronic low back pain characterized by the NIH Research Task Force Recommended Minimal Dataset reported current pain NRS and provided imagined examples of painful experiences also attributing to these an NRS. We present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 797 pain examples provided by the study subjects.

Results: Study subjects tended to be able to imagine both highly painful 10/10 events and non-painful events with relative agreement across subjects. While NRS for the pain examples tended to increase with example severity, for many types of examples there was wide dispersion around the mean pain level. Examination of pain examples indicated unexpected relationships between current pain and the intensity and nature of the imagined painful events.

Conclusions: Our results indicate that the pain NRS does not provide a reliably interpretable assessment of current physical pain intensity for an individual with chronic pain at a specific moment.

Citing Articles

Patients' strategies for numeric pain assessment: a qualitative interview study of individuals with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

Halverson C, Doyle T Disabil Rehabil. 2023; 46(8):1527-1533.

PMID: 37067184 PMC: 10579449. DOI: 10.1080/09638288.2023.2200039.

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