Papers of the Week

The new ICD-11 code for chronic pain indicates a direction to divide chronic pain into two categories: chronic secondary pain, which has a clear underlying disease, and chronic primary pain, which is associated with significant emotional distress or functional disability and cannot be explained by another chronic condition. Until now, epidemiological studies have been hampered by the lack of a clear classification, but we believe that this new code system will provide a new perspective on the diagnosis and treatment of chronic pain, and we have begun work on this code system.