Browse by Audience
Pain experience due to spinal degenerative disease decreases activity of daily living and quality of life. The present cross-sectional study was aimed at examining the sex-specific impact of pain severity, psychosocial factors, and insomnia on the disability due to chronic pain arising from spinal degenerative disease.
The aim of this study was to uncover possible psychosocial underpinnings of pain and sleep disturbance in a safety-net primary care sample.
Measuring health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in patients with chronic low back pain (LBP) is crucial to monitor and improve the patients' health status through effective rehabilitation. While the 12-item short-form health survey (SF-12) was developed as a shorter alternative to the 36-item short-form health survey for assessing HRQOL in large-scale studies, to date, no cross-culturally adapted and validated Hausa version exists. This study aimed to translate and cross-culturally adapt the SF-12 into Hausa language, and test its psychometric properties in mixed urban and rural Nigerian populations with chronic LBP.
The present study aimed to investigate the use of imaging biomarkers to predict the outcome of acupuncture in patients with migraine without aura (MwoA). Forty-one patients with MwoA received 4 weeks of acupuncture treatment and two brain imaging sessions at the Beijing Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital affiliated with Capital Medical University. Patients kept a headache diary for 4 weeks before treatment and during acupuncture treatment. Responders were defined as those with at least a 50% reduction in the number of migraine days. The machine learning method was used to distinguish responders from non-responders based on pre-treatment brain gray matter (GM) volume. Longitudinal changes in GM predictive regions were also analyzed. After 4 weeks of acupuncture, 19 patients were classified as responders. Based on 10-fold cross-validation for the selection of GM features, the linear support vector machine produced a classification model with 73% sensitivity, 85% specificity, and 83% accuracy. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.7871. This classification model included 10 GM areas that were mainly distributed in the frontal, temporal, parietal, precuneus, and cuneus gyri. The reduction in the number of migraine days was correlated with baseline GM volume in the cuneus, parietal, and frontal gyri in all patients. Moreover, the left cuneus showed a longitudinal increase in GM volume in responders. The results suggest that pre-treatment brain structure could be a novel predictor of the outcome of acupuncture in the treatment of MwoA. Imaging features could be a useful tool for the prediction of acupuncture efficacy, which would enable the development of a personalized medicine strategy.
There is a need for reliable and valid clinical assessment tools for quantifying allodynia in neuropathic pain. Allodynography has been proposed as a useful standardized procedure for clinical assessment of mechanical allodynia. This study (www.clinicaltrials.gov NCT02070367) undertook preliminary investigation of the measurement properties of allodynography, a new standardized clinical examination procedure for mapping the area of cutaneous allodynia.
The aim of this population-based validated study was to determine the course of tension-type headache and migraine and to evaluate the predictors of persistence.
Recent research has highlighted a need for the psychometric evaluation of instruments targeting core domains of the pain experience in chronic pain populations. In this study, the measurement properties of SF-36, EQ-5D, and HADS were analyzed within the item response-theory framework based on data from 35,908 patients. To assess the structural validity of these instruments, the empirical representations of several conceptually substantiated latent structures were compared in a cross-validation procedure. The most structurally sound representations were selected from each questionnaire and their internal consistency reliability computed as a summary of their precision. Lastly, questionnaire scores were correlated to each other to evaluate their convergent and discriminant validity. Our results supported that SF-36 is an acceptable measure of two independent constructs of physical and mental health. In contrast, although the approach to summarize the HRQoL construct of EQ-5D as a unidimensional score was valid, its low reliability rendered practical model implementation of doubtful utility. Finally, rather than being separated into two subscales of anxiety and depression, HADS was a valid and reliable measure of overall emotional distress. In support of convergent and discriminant validity, correlations between questionnaires showed that theoretically similar traits were highly associated whereas unrelated traits were not. Our models can be applied to score SF-36 and HADS in chronic pain patients, but we recommend against using the EQ-5D model due to its low reliability. These results are useful for researchers and clinicians involved in chronic pain populations, as questionnaires' properties determine their discriminating ability in patient status assessment.
To examine the characteristics of primary stabbing headache (PSH) in typically developing children and adolescents.
To investigate mental and physical health comorbidity with chronic back or neck pain in the Chinese population, and assess the level of disability associated with chronic back or neck pain.
Pain catastrophizing is linked to a range of negative health and treatment outcomes, although debate continues about how best to define and treat it, since most interventions produce only modest benefit. This study aimed to contribute to theory-driven development of these treatments by exploring the role of perseverative thinking in pain catastrophizing, along with the higher order beliefs, called metacognitions, that might shape it.