Full Description
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.
Contents
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
