14 DAY TRIAL // In an effort to facilitate communication between patients who are in chronic pains and their physicians and healthcare providers, a team of experts is currently working on developing a common vocabulary for describing pain.
The tool will help patients better relate their actual condition. At the same time, it will enable physicians to compare the reports they are getting with others that have been collected from around the world, and centralized in a single resource.
For doctors, understanding what their patients are feeling and how is the key for deciding how to treat them. Wrong or misguided decisions can have severe repercussions, including death in extreme cases.
The most important step in the new effort researchers are putting forth is aggregating experiences and pooling data from chronic pain patients around the world. The centralized database will contain millions of data entry points.
Over time, more and more data will be added to the tool, further increasing its efficiency, and making life easier for sufferers and doctors alike. “Pain research is very difficult because nothing allows the physician to see the patient’s pain directly,” explains Werner Ceusters, MD.
“The patient has to describe what he or she is feeling,” adds the scientist, who was the principal investigator on the research. Ceusters holds an appointment at the University of Buffalo, in the US.
The main issue with pain descriptions is that they are not very specific or precise. In some cases, the very nature of the disease being treated may cause diffuse pains, whose sources cannot be pinpointed by patients with any degree of accuracy.
“If we want to more effectively help people suffering from chronic pain, we need to study a population that is consistent, patients who have features in common,” Ceusters adds, quoted by PsychCentral.
“The problem with pain is, it’s very hard to build up a group with the same sort of pain. People don’t have the same vocabulary or linguistic capabilities or even the same cultural backgrounds,” he adds.
“It’s something pain researchers have struggled with for decades. We need to develop a vocabulary of pain. The philosophical definition of ontology is the study of things that exist and how they relate to each other,” the expert explains
As the investigation stars, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant will allow experts to collect thousands of date point entries from patients in the US, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Israel and Germany. An ontology will then be developed to produce pain type classifications.
“The goal is to integrate the data together so that we have a large pool of data that will allow us to obtain better insight into the complexity of pain disorders, specifically the assessment of pain disorders and how they impact mental health and a patients’ quality of life,” Ceusters concludes.