ISBN : 9780199235766
Chronic pain is a major cause of distress, disability, and work loss, and it is becoming increasingly prevalent through the general move towards an ageing population, which impacts dramatically upon society and health care systems worldwide. Due to improvements in health care, it is becoming more common for patients to continue living with long-term illness or disease (rather than these being terminal). Yet little attention has been paid to chronic pain as a public health problem or to the potential for its prevention, even though it can be studied and assessed using concepts and ideas from classical epidemiology. This book takes an unusual approach in making a symptom the focus of public health research and policy. Written by leaders in the field of pain, it fills a gap in current literature by presenting chronic pain in terms of cause, impact, consequence and prevention. It presents individual conditions as examples of chronic pain, together with chapters that provide overviews on the assessment of pain and methodological issues behind population assessment. Chronic Pain Epidemiology - From Aetiology to Public Health provides an invaluable framework and basis for thinking about chronic pain and the potential for its prevention in public health terms. It will appeal to readers from public health, epidemiology and policy perspectives, and those involved in the treatment of pain - such as pain researchers, clinicians and specialists. It will also be an invaluable resource for postgraduate students studying pain management, public health, and epidemiology.
Contributors
SECTION 1: BASIC IDEAS
1. Chronic pain as a topic for epidemiology and public health
2. The global occurrence of chronic pain: an introduction
3. The demography of chronic pain: an overview
Appendix to Section 1: Basic epidemiological concepts applied to pain
SECTION 2: DEFINITION AND MEASUREMENT OF CHRONIC PAIN FOR POPULATION STUDIES
4. Introduction
5. Measuring chronic pain in populations
6. Measuring the impact of chronic pain on populations: a narrative review
7. Number of pain sites - a simple measure of population risk?
SECTION 3: MECHANISMS
8. The genetic epidemiology of pain
9. The biological response to stress and chronic pain
10. Musculoskeletal pain complaints from a sex and gender perspective
SECTION 4: COMMON PAIN SYNDROMES
11. Introduction
12. The symptom of pain in populations
13. Headache
14. Pain in children
15. Life-course influences on chronic pain in adults
16. Pain in older people
SECTION 5: PAIN AND DISEASE
17. Disease-related pain: an introduction
18. Neuropathic pain
19. Post-surgical pain
20. Chronic chest pain, myocardial ischaemia and coronary artery disease phenotypes
21. Cancer and chronic pain
SECTION 6: PUBLIC HEALTH AND CHRONIC PAIN
22. Introduction to chronic pain as a public health problem
23. Pharmacological treatment: the example of osteoarthritis
24. The potential for prevention: occupation
25. Can we change a population's perspective on pain?
26. The potential for prevention: overview
Index