• Support Care Cancer · Oct 2012

    Interviews with patients with advanced cancer--another step towards an international cancer pain classification system.

    • Anne Kari Knudsen, Nina Aass, Ellen Heitzer, Pål Klepstad, Marianne Jensen Hjermstad, Walter Schippinger, Elisabeth Brenne, Stein Kaasa, Elisabet Wasteson, and European Palliative Care Research Collaborative (EPCRC).
    • European Palliative Care Research Centre, Department of Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, NTNU, Trondheim University Hospital, Trondheim, Norway. anne.k.knudsen@ntnu.no
    • Support Care Cancer. 2012 Oct 1;20(10):2491-500.

    PurposePatients' involvement in the development of assessment tools is recommended, and the European Palliative Care Research Collaborative has adhered to this when developing a shared language for cancer pain, an international assessment and classification system. Study objectives were to investigate how patients ranked the relevance of several previously identified pain domains, to investigate patients' perception of the pain experience and to disclose additional, relevant pain domains for cancer pain classification to those identified in the literature.MethodsSemistructured interviews with advanced cancer patients treated with opioids were performed and analysed verbatim. Patients scored the relevance of predefined pain domains on an 11-point Numerical Rating Scale.ResultsThirty-three Norwegian and Austrian patients were included (16 females and 17 males); the mean age was 63 years, and the mean Karnofsky performance score was 65. The ranking of domains was as follows etiology (mean Numerical Rating Scale score, 8.5), duration (8.0), intensity (7.4), coping (7.1), physical (5.9) and psychological functioning (5.8). Sleep was identified as a new candidate domain to include in the system. The patients emphasised consequences of having pain, for example, poor physical functioning and psychological distress.ConclusionsPreviously identified pain domains were confirmed to be relevant to the patients; however, the ranking differed from the experts' ranking. Sleep disturbances may be added as a domain in a future classification system.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…