Pain after spinal cord injury: an evidence-based review for clinical practice and research. Report of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research Spinal Cord Injury Measures meeting.

Background/objectives: To examine the reliability, validity, sensitivity, and practicality of various outcome measures for pain after spinal cord injury (SCI), and to provide recommendations for specific measures for use in clinical trials.

Data Sources: Relevant articles were obtained through a search of MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and PubMed databases from inception through 2006.

Study Selection: The authors performed literature searches to find articles containing data relevant to the reliability and validity of each pain outcome measure in SCI and selected non-SCI populations.

Life satisfaction in individuals with a spinal cord injury and pain.

Objective: To assess and describe life satisfaction in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) with regard to pain.

Design: A cross-sectional descriptive study of self-reported life satisfaction in individuals with SCI, with and without pain.

Setting: Spinal outpatient clinic.

Evaluation of variations in sensory and pain threshold assessments by electrocutaneous stimulation.

Assessed sensory and pain thresholds can change consequently to disturbances associated with ongoing pain. Such assessments could be an additional method in the daily clinical evaluation of perceived pain. To study the test-retest variability within-day and between-day of such procedures a newly developed instrument producing electrocutaneous stimulation, PainMatcher (PM), was used to assess the electrical sensory thresholds (EST) and pain thresholds (EPT) in healthy volunteers and in patients with pain.

Lack of interchangeability between visual analogue and verbal rating pain scales: a cross sectional description of pain etiology groups.

Background: Rating scales like the visual analogue scale, VAS, and the verbal rating scale, VRS, are often used for pain assessments both in clinical work and in research, despite the lack of a gold standard. Interchangeability of recorded pain intensity captured in the two scales has been discussed earlier, but not in conjunction with taking the influence of pain etiology into consideration.

Methods: In this cross-sectional study, patients with their pain classified according to its etiology (chronic/idiopathic, nociceptive and neuropathic pain) were consecutively recruited for self-assessment of their actual pain intensity using a continuous VAS, 0-100, and a discrete five-category VRS.

Neuropathic pain after traumatic spinal cord injury--relations to gender, spinal level, completeness, and age at the time of injury.

Study Design: Retrospective register study.

Objective: To investigate the predictive value of age at the time of injury, gender, level of injury, and completeness of injury for the development of at level and below level neuropathic pain.

Setting: "Spinalis", a postacute spinal cord injury (SCI) outpatient clinic, serving the greater Stockholm area (Sweden).