Current pain and headache reports
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Several empirical studies have shown that personal characteristics act as differential variables, which determine how pain is experienced and how the chronic pain patient adjusts to pain. The main aim of the present research is to review the relationships between some dispositional characteristics and pain adjustment. ⋯ The results suggest that it would be useful to include an assessment of normal personality structure during the multi-dimensional evaluation of a person with chronic pain. Understanding these individual personality characteristics will aid in designing pain intervention programs and help predict possible treatment outcomes.
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Curr Pain Headache Rep · Mar 2013
ReviewPsychological resilience, pain catastrophizing, and positive emotions: perspectives on comprehensive modeling of individual pain adaptation.
Pain is a complex construct that contributes to profound physical and psychological dysfunction, particularly in individuals coping with chronic pain. The current paper builds upon previous research, describes a balanced conceptual model that integrates aspects of both psychological vulnerability and resilience to pain, and reviews protective and exacerbating psychosocial factors to the process of adaptation to chronic pain, including pain catastrophizing, pain acceptance, and positive psychological resources predictive of enhanced pain coping. The current paper identifies future directions for research that will further enrich the understanding of pain adaptation and espouses an approach that will enhance the ecological validity of psychological pain coping models, including introduction of advanced statistical and conceptual models that integrate behavioral, cognitive, information processing, motivational and affective theories of pain.
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Cancer pain is one of most prevalent symptoms in patients with cancer. Acupuncture and related techniques have been suggested for the management of cancer pain. ⋯ It also provides "actionable" acupuncture protocols for specific cancer pain conditions and related symptoms in order to provide more clinically relevant solutions for clinicians and cancer patients with pain. These conditions include postoperative cancer pain, postoperative nausea and vomiting, postsurgical gastroparesis syndrome, opioid-induced constipation, opioid-induced pruritus, chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, aromatase inhibitor-associated joint pain, and neck dissection-related pain and dysfunction.
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Curr Pain Headache Rep · Mar 2013
ReviewTemperament, character, and personality disorders in chronic pain.
In the past decades investigators have used personality inventories to help explain the relationship between personality and pain experience. This article reviews empirical research, which has examined temperament and character features in chronic pain patients. ⋯ According to Cloninger's model, research portrayed a common personality profile of chronic pain patients characterized by prevailing harm avoidance and lower self-directedness, which has been shown to predict the presence of a personality disorder. Pain-prone patients could benefit from the measurement of personality by the temperament and character inventory with improved treatment response.
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Curr Pain Headache Rep · Mar 2013
ReviewPeripheral nerve stimulation for the treatment of primary headache.
A headache is a common neurological disorder, and large numbers of patients suffer from intractable headaches including migraine, tension headache and cluster headache, etc., with no clear therapeutic options. Despite the advances made in the treatment of headaches over the last few decades, subsets of patients either do not achieve adequate pain relief or cannot tolerate the side effects of typical migraine medications. An electrical stimulation of the peripheral nerves via an implantable pulse generator appears to be good alternative option for patients with treatment-refractory headaches. ⋯ The decision to use PNS should be individualized based on patient suffering and disability. Hence, further work is imperative. Here, we discuss the mechanism, indication, efficacy, implant technique, and complications of PNS.