Pain characteristics and their psychosocial clinical correlates

Shulamith Kreitler*, Tamar Ezer, Hana Gohar, David Niv

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

In view of the larger number and heterogeneity of pain patients, our major goal was to examine focal pain-intrinsic variables that could serve for classifying pain patients. We focused on variables common in pain inventories - pain duration (including acute vs chronic), pain persistence (continuous vs intermittent) and pain attribution (only to physical vs physical + psychological causes) and checked for each separately their demographic features and clinical, emotional, psychaitric, and pain-descriptive correlates. The subjects were 84 pain patients selected randomly from two pain clinics. They were administered questionnaires assessing demographic and clinical features, alexithymia, trait anxiety, and anger (Spielberger's STPI-X), inhibited anger (Kreitler and Kreitler), psychiatric tendencies (Derogatis, BSI), and pain experience (McGill Pain Questionnaire and Meaning Pain Scale). The results were that the variable with most correlates was pain attribution, followed by pain duration. Clinical and emotional features predominated among, the correlates. For each variable the correlates provided a significant prediction (by discriminant analysis). Major conclusions are that of the three examined variables pain attribution is the best candidate for a classification factor and that the quest for a constant classification system should be replaced by examining features differentiating pain patients in specific frameworks or for particular goals.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)313-327
Number of pages15
JournalPain Clinic
Volume11
Issue number4
StatePublished - 1999

Keywords

  • Acute and chronic pain
  • Attribution
  • Pain classification
  • Pain duration
  • Pain persistence

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