Articles: pain-measurement.
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Sex differences in heat-pain and thermal sensitivity were investigated in 32 women (20 to 60 years of age) and 32 men (17 to 63 years of age) who had no somatosensory impairments. Pain thresholds were measured with stimuli of two different durations (phasic and tonic). Warmth and cold thresholds were assessed as indices of thermal sensitivity. ⋯ Women had significantly lower warmth thresholds than men (more pronounced on the foot than on the hand), but similar cold thresholds. Measures of body size (weight, height) correlated much more strongly with thermal than with pain sensitivity, and helped to explain the sex difference in the warmth threshold. A reduction of sex differences to body-measure differences appears likely, but could not be demonstrated unequivocally.
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Patients with burns often suffer severe pain, especially during dressing of wounds, but there are no established alternatives to potent opiate analgesics, with their various side-effects. Intravenous lignocaine infusion strikingly reduced self-assessed pain scores in 7 patients during the first 3 days after second-degree burns, without need for supplementary opiate analgesia.
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There are many options available to measure a child's self-report of pain. Many factors should be considered when choosing a scale, including previous testing, ease of administration, age of the child, and type of pain experience. When selecting a measure, it is important to pretest it with a sample similar to that in the proposed study to evaluate these factors.
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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.