Pain
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Using reference values from healthy volunteers, thermal and vibration-induced pain thresholds and the sensibility for warm and cold were studied in 18 patients with neuralgia in one hand following a traumatic injury or surgery. All patients had spontaneous pain and allodynia to vibration. They were treated with intravenous regional guanethidine block (RGB). ⋯ After RGB, there was no change in thermal pain thresholds and the allodynia to vibration persisted. These patients were classified as having sympathetically independent pain (SIP). The results indicate that quantitative thermal sensory tests, together with clinical evaluation of the nerve trauma, can help to predict which patients will have long-lasting pain alleviation after RGB treatment.
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Sixty-five subjects experienced 2 cold pressor immersions. Following the initial immersion, subjects participated in the Velten mood induction procedure by reading either depressive, neutral or elative statements. The sensory discriminative response to pain was measured by ratings of pain, and the affective-reactive response to pain was measured by pain tolerance. Pain tolerance, but not pain ratings, were affected by mood inductions with subjects in the depression condition shortening their tolerance times more than the subjects in the neutral condition and the subjects in the elative condition increasing their tolerance times.
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Based upon a tripartite theoretical model of pain, the Pain Rating Index (PRI) of the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) continues to be one of the most frequently used instruments to measure clinical pain. Although a number of exploratory factor analytic studies have failed to consistently support the theoretical structure of the instrument, one previous confirmatory factor analytic study of chronic pain did statistically support the a priori model. Because it has been suggested that acute pain may not involve the same dimensions as chronic pain, this study provided a direct test of the theoretical structure of the MPQ through multi-sample confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using data provided by women experiencing pain during labor (n = 185) and women experiencing acute postoperative pain (n = 192). Results of the LISREL CFA analysis indicated that the a priori, 3-factor, oblique model originally proposed by Melzack provided the most parsimonious representation of the data across the 2 samples of acute pain.