Previous investigations on acute postoperative pain dynamicity have focused on daily pain assessments, and so were unable to examine intraday variations in acute pain intensity. We analyzed 476,108 postoperative acute pain intensity ratings, which were clinically documented on postoperative days 1 to 7 from 8346 surgical patients using Markov chain modeling to describe how patients are likely to transition from one pain state to another in a probabilistic fashion. The Markov chain was found to be irreducible and positive recurrent, with no absorbing states.
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