Pain in head and neck cancer: prevalence and possible predictive factors.

The purpose of this article was to review the main aspects of pain and its prevalence among head and neck cancer patients, as well as to identify the presence of possible pain predictive factors. For an integrated presentation of this topic a Pubmed database systematic search for relevant published studies was performed. When considering the prevalence of pain in head and neck cancer patients the studies available in this field show great variations in relation to the number of patients included, surgical procedures performed, and established approaches to analgesia.