Biological inflammatory markers mediate the effect of preoperative pain-related behaviours on postoperative analgesics requirements.

Background: The predictive value of an individual's attitude towards painful situations and the status of his immune system for postoperative analgesic requirements are not well understood. These may help the clinician to anticipate individual patient's needs.

Methods: Sixty patients, who underwent a laparoscopic cholecystectomy under standardised general anaesthesia, were included.

The fine tuning of pain thresholds: a sophisticated double alarm system.

Two distinctive features characterize the way in which sensations including pain, are evoked by heat: (1) a thermal stimulus is always progressive; (2) a painful stimulus activates two different types of nociceptors, connected to peripheral afferent fibers with medium and slow conduction velocities, namely Adelta- and C-fibers. In the light of a recent study in the rat, our objective was to develop an experimental paradigm in humans, based on the joint analysis of the stimulus and the response of the subject, to measure the thermal thresholds and latencies of pain elicited by Adelta- and C-fibers. For comparison, the same approach was applied to the sensation of warmth elicited by thermoreceptors.

How many response levels do children distinguish on faces scales for pain assessment?

Faces scales are one of the most commonly used instruments to assess pain intensity in children. Most available faces scales present five to seven faces. The present research was conducted to investigate the ability of 4- to 7-year-old children to distinguish the response categories of different faces scales.

Measure of experimental pain using Rasch analysis.

Most common instruments used to assess the painfulness of nociceptive stimuli and the perception of such stimuli are ordinal. This property limits arithmetical operations and statistical procedures that can be applied on their numbers. The Rasch methodology provides mathematical procedures for transforming scores on an ordinal scale into measures on an interval scale.