European journal of pain : EJP
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Dealing with cancer pain implies assessing the intensity and other attributes of pain and identifying appropriate outcomes and endpoints to evaluate the effect of treatments. ⋯ All measures applied seem able to profile the evolution of pain, with some differences. This implies the need of an appropriate choice of outcomes and endpoints according to the goal and objective of the intervention under evaluation.
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Emotions form an important component in the expression and manifestation of pain. This study tested whether emotionally loaded visual and gustatory conditioning stimuli could influence experimental jaw muscle pain. ⋯ These results suggest that not all conditioning stimuli are potent modifiers of emotions, which seems to be a prerequisite for effects on muscle pain perception.
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Convergent data showed that neuropathic pain has specific characteristics at cephalic versus extra-cephalic level, where single-targeted drugs differentially alleviate pain. Because the novel analgesic drug, tapentadol, is acting at two targets, μ-opioid receptors (as agonist) and noradrenaline reuptake (as inhibitor), we tested its effects on neuropathic pain at both cephalic and extra-cephalic levels. ⋯ The dual synergistic pharmacological properties of tapentadol, which result in clear-cut anti-neuropathic pain effects at both cephalic and extra-cephalic levels, probably involve mechanisms downstream of nerve injury-induced neuroinflammatory reaction.
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Recent studies suggest an underlying three- or four-factor structure explains the conceptual overlap and distinctiveness of several negative emotionality and pain-related constructs. However, the validity of these latent factors for predicting pain has not been examined. ⋯ Our results provide support for three latent psychological factors explaining the majority of the variance between several pain-related psychological measures, and that individuals in the high negative emotionality subgroup are at increased risk for (1) acute local muscle pain; (2) local hyperalgesia; and (3) referred pain using a standardized nociceptive input.