Articles: pain-management.
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Reliability is a topic in health science in which a critical appraisal of the magnitudes of the measurements is often left aside to favour a formulaic analysis. Furthermore, the relationship between clinical relevance and reliability of measurements is often overlooked. In this context, the aim of the present article is to provide an overview of the design and analysis of reliability studies, the interpretation of the reliability of measurements and its relationship to clinical significance in the context of pain research and management. ⋯ SIGNIFICANCE: Reliability studies quantify the measurement error in experimental or clinical setups and should be interpreted as a continuous outcome. The assessment of measurement error is useful to design and interpret future experimental studies and clinical interventions. Reliability and clinical relevance are inextricably linked, as measurement error should be considered in the interpretation of minimal detectable change and minimal clinically important differences.
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Psychological treatments for chronic pain have helped many people around the world. They are among the most researched and best evidenced treatments a person can receive when they have persistent, disabling and distressing pain. At the same time, improvements in the effectiveness of these treatments appear to be at a standstill. This may be due to an inherent lack of generalizability from aggregated group data to the individual, limited utility of our current schemes for categorizing people with pain conditions, faced with their inherent heterogeneity, our relatively coarse categories of treatment types and focus on treatment packages rather than individual methods, and our current failures to find adequate predictors of outcome, or to assign people their best-suited treatment methods, based on group data. In this review, it is argued that the development and examination of truly personalized treatment is a next logical step to create progress and improve the results people achieve. ⋯ Psychological approaches to chronic pain have been highly successful in the past but improvement in the effectiveness of these over time is slow to nonexistent. It is argued here that this has happened due to a failure to adequately consider the individual. Future psychological treatments for chronic pain ought to incorporate an idiographic, process-based approach, focused on evidence-based mechanisms of change, individually and dynamically addressed, grounded in ongoing contextually sensitive assessment.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Cost-utility Analysis of Evoke closed-loop Spinal Cord Stimulation for Chronic Back and Leg Pain.
The effectiveness of Evoke closed-loop spinal cord stimulation (CL-SCS), a novel modality of neurostimulation, has been demonstrated in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). The objective of this cost-utility analysis was to develop a de novo economic model to estimate the cost-effectiveness of Evoke CL-SCS when compared with open-loop SCS (OL-SCS) for the management of chronic back and leg pain. ⋯ The results indicate a strong economic case for the use of Evoke CL-SCS in the management of chronic back and leg pain with or without prior spinal surgery with dominance observed at ~5 years.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Subcutaneous versus intravenous tramadol for extremity injury with moderate pain in the emergency department: a randomised controlled noninferiority trial.
Musculoskeletal trauma is a common presentation in the emergency department (ED). Tramadol as an analgesic has been recommended by pain management guidelines for musculoskeletal pain. Parenteral tramadol in the ED is commonly administered intravenously. Subcutaneously administered tramadol may have other advantages such as easier and faster preparation, avoids the need for intravenous (i.v.) access, and reduces the incidence of respiratory and gastrointestinal effects. However, studies comparing subcutaneous (s.c.) and i.v. tramadol for the management of acute moderate pain in patients with extremity injury are lacking. ⋯ The s.c. tramadol is noninferior to i.v. tramadol in the treatment of moderate pain from extremity injuries.