European journal of pain : EJP
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Chronic pain affects up to half of UK adults, impacting quality of life and demand on local health services. Whilst local health planning is currently based on subnational prevalence estimates, associations between pain and sociodemographic characteristics suggest that inequalities in the prevalence of chronic and high-impact chronic pain between neighbourhoods within local authorities are likely. We aimed to derive lower super output area (LSOA) estimates of the prevalence of chronic and high-impact chronic pain. ⋯ Post-stratified multilevel model predictions can produce small-area estimates of pain prevalence and impact. The evidence of substantial variation indicates a need to collect local-level data on pain and its impact to understand health needs and to guide interventions.
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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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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.
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There are few studies on chronic pain prevalence in people living with HIV, and there are no studies comparing chronic pain prevalence in an HIV-infected group (HIV+) to that found in an uninfected group (HIV-) in the same population. This study was undertaken to (1) estimate the chronic pain prevalence in HIV+ individuals and (2) compare chronic pain prevalence between HIV+ and HIV- groups in a population. ⋯ Using data from a large, national, population-based study in South Africa, I show for the first time that the prevalence of chronic pain in that population did not differ materially between the part of the population that was living with HIV compared with their uninfected counterparts (both approximately 20%). These findings run counter to the dogma that there is a greater risk of having pain in people living with HIV.
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There is poor knowledge about the therapeutic mechanisms of the conservative interventions for endometriosis. We hypothesized that the effects of a brief mindfulness-based intervention (bMBI) on pelvic pain intensity (PPI), pain unpleasantness (PU) and quality of life mental health (QoL-MH) are mediated by direct and indirect paths of changes in pain catastrophizing (PC), positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). ⋯ Brief mindfulness-based intervention improves endometriosis pain through pain-related cognitive-affective factors and quality of life mental health via pain and affect changes unrelated to pain.