European journal of pain : EJP
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Pain empathy is essential for high-quality of care. The cognitive ability to identify and understand the pain in others remains underexplored in the context of hospital shift work. This study aimed to observe the early subliminal ability to detect pain in other faces and to investigate pain intensity evaluations during day and night shifts. ⋯ Some professions need to know how to assess pain 24/7 and a lack of sleep can disrupt the cognitive processes necessary for this assessment. Night shifts provoke a bias in pain management, and sleep deprivation, a decrease in pain evaluation. By conducting a repeated measure study in the field that applied a different paradigm (subliminal recognition of facial cues) we add evidence to the understanding of pain recognition and the impact of sleep deprivation on the early processing of pain in others.
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Paediatric chronic pain was a public health emergency before the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and this problem is predicted to escalate. Pain tends to occur intergenerationally in families, and youth with chronic pain and their parents have high rates of mental health issues, which can further exacerbate pain. Siblings of youth with chronic pain have been largely overlooked in research, as well as the impact of the pandemic on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and healthcare utilization. ⋯ This study examined pain, mental health, substance use and healthcare utilization in youth with chronic pain, siblings and parents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Greater personal impact of the pandemic was not largely associated with poorer pain outcomes; however, it was associated with mental health, with the largest effect on PTSD symptoms. The high rates and significant association of COVID-19 impact with PTSD symptoms underscore the importance of including PTSD assessment as part of routine screening practices in pain clinics.
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Chronic pain of different aetiologies and localization has been associated with less grey matter volume (GMV) in several cortical and subcortical brain areas. Recent meta-analyses reported low reproducibility of GMV alterations between studies and pain syndromes. ⋯ Grey matter reorganization could serve as a diagnostic biomarker for chronic pain. In a large cohort, we here replicated findings of less grey matter volume across three pain conditions in the left anterior and posterior insula, anterior cingulate and left hippocampus. Less hippocampal grey matter was mediated by experienced stress.
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Infrared laser stimulation is a valuable tool in pain research, its primary application being the recording of laser-evoked brain potentials (LEPs). Different types of laser stimulators, varying in their skin penetrance, are likely to have a large influence on the LEPs, when stimulating different skin types. The aim of this study was to investigate how LEPs depend on laser type and skin location. ⋯ This study showed that the elicitation of laser-evoked potentials in healthy humans greatly depends on the combination of laser stimulator type and skin type. It was shown that high penetrance laser stimuli are capable of eliciting responses in both hairy and glabrous skin, whereas low penetrance stimuli barely elicited responses from the glabrous skin. Computational modelling was used to demonstrate that the results could be fully explained by the combination of laser type and skin thickness.