The study will be for multiple pain conditions. I'm putting together IRB to study quantitative and qualitative benefits of craniosacral therapy with chronic pain.
As it was mentioned above both McGill pain Questionnaire and VAS can help you, but may I suggest to take a look also at the EQL 5 Questionnaire that also measures health status that is important for pre and after treatment evaluation
Thank you for the suggestion Eleni-Christina. Do you have a link or website where I can find an example? I am having a difficult time locating information on this scale using Google.
Hi Laura, the website you are looking for is www.euroqol.org.
I hope I ve helped you
I think you can use NPR. (Numerical pain rating scale) which is a valid tool. But the problem is making people to understand it.
You might want to check out the NIH PROMIS measures: http://www.nihpromis.org/#1
Like Eleni-Christina, we tend to measure health-related quality of life as well as pain. The PROMIS measures include a pain interference scale, measuring the impact of pain on daily life.
Thank you for the contributions: Arun, Laura and Keturah. I look forward to researching the different pain scales.
The best reference for outcome measures are derived from the IMMPACT group. http://www.immpact.org/
This is an international collaboration attempting to develop a consensus of the most useful measures for pain research.
This paper details some of their recommendations:
Turk, D. C., Dworkin, R. H., Burke, L. B., Gershon, R., Rothman, M., Scott, J., . . . Pain Assessment in Clinical, T. (2006). Developing patient-reported outcome measures for pain clinical trials: IMMPACT recommendations. Pain, 125(3), 208-215. doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2006.09.028
I recognise that there are an enormous number of assessment tools available - what's important is to ensure they're sensitive to change, have good psychometric properties, measure what you need/want to measure, that scoring is reasonably simple, and that they don't place too great a burden on your participants. Having said that, people will complete more questionnaires than we often acknowledge, so it's worth thinking broadly.
Dear Laura,
I agree with the suggestions of Bronnie and the references that she has recommended. In my experience with adults, we use monodimensional scales for acute pain but we prefer to use multidimensional tools for chronic pain that interferes with functional status and quality of life of patients. So in the first case we use the numerical scale presenting it vertically to elderly patients, the scale PAINAD for people with dementia while in the second case we use the short version of the Brief Pain Inventory with satisfactory results. Since there are no perfect tools the use of tools widely used can help you when comparing the results.
There are many papers that have been written about the autonomic nervous system going out of balance under chronic pain conditions. One can use autonomic nervous systems monitoring as a surrogate for an objective measure of pain.
Chronic pain causes a heavy sympathetic dominance and an unbalance of the ANS. Pain treatment brings the ANS closer to balance and decreases the sympathetic predominance. Measuring this provides a baseline at the start of the treatment. Ongoing monitoring allows measuring the progress of the treatment.
Recently I came across interesting chart of pain assessment tool referred as Wong-Baker Faces...
It shows a numeric scale 1-10 for different expressions of faces of patients from mild to severe scale.
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