Chronic and Acute Pain: News and Information
Author: Disabled World (DW)
Updated/Revised Date: 2025/01/27
Category Topic: Pain: Acute and Chronic (Publications Database)
Page Content: Synopsis - Introduction - Main - Subtopics
Synopsis: Information including the latest research news on treating human chronic and acute pain conditions. Pain is highly subjective to the individual experiencing it and is a significant symptom in many medical conditions, significantly interfering with a person's quality of life and general functioning. Pain, in the sense of physical pain, is a typical sensory experience defined as the unpleasant awareness of a noxious stimulus or bodily harm. Individuals experience pain through various daily hurts and aches and occasionally through more severe injuries or illnesses.
Defining Pain
- Pain
Pain is a feeling triggered in the nervous system. Pain may be sharp or dull. It may come and go, or it may be constant. Pain is mediated by specific nerve fibers that carry the pain impulses to the brain, where many factors may modify their conscious appreciation. Pain can help diagnose a problem. Without pain, you might seriously hurt yourself without knowing it, or you might not realize you have a medical concern that needs treatment. Once you take care of the issue, the pain usually goes away. However, sometimes pain lasts for weeks, months, or even years. This is called chronic pain. Sometimes chronic pain is due to an ongoing cause, such as cancer or arthritis.
Introduction
Pain, in the sense of physical pain, is a typical sensory experience defined as the unpleasant awareness of a noxious stimulus or bodily harm. Individuals experience pain through various daily hurts and aches and occasionally through more serious injuries or illnesses. The word suffering is sometimes used in the narrow sense of physical pain. Still, it refers more often to mental or emotional pain or pain in the broad sense, i.e., to any unpleasant feeling, emotion, or sensation. The word pain usually refers to physical pain, but it is also a common synonym for suffering.
The words pain and suffering are typically used both together in different ways. Or they may be used in 'contradistinction' to one another, as in "pain is inevitable, suffering is optional" or "pain is physical, suffering is mental." Or they may be used to define each other, as in "pain is physical suffering" or "suffering is severe physical or mental pain."
Main Content
Pain may range in intensity from slight through severe to unbearable and can appear as constant or intermittent. Pain is highly subjective to the individual experiencing it and is a major symptom in many medical conditions, significantly interfering with a person's quality of life and general functioning.
Typical descriptions of pain quality include sharp, stabbing, tearing, squeezing, cramping, burning, lancinating (electric-shock-like), or heaviness. It may be experienced as throbbing, dull, nauseating, shooting, or a combination of these.
Diagnosis is based on characterizing pain in various ways, according to duration, intensity, type (dull, burning, or stabbing), source, or location in the body. Usually, the pain stops without treatment or responds to simple measures such as resting or taking an analgesic called 'acute' pain. But it may also become intractable and develop into a condition called chronic pain, in which pain is no longer considered a symptom but an illness by itself.
To understand an individual's pain, healthcare practitioners will typically try to establish certain characteristics of the pain: site, onset and offset, character, radiation, associated symptoms, time pattern, exacerbating and ameliorating factors, and severity.
Medical management of pain has given rise to a distinction between acute and chronic pain. Acute pain is 'normal' pain; it is felt when hurting a toe, breaking a bone, having a toothache, or walking after an extensive surgical operation. Chronic pain is a 'pain illness'; it is felt day after day, month after month, and seems impossible to heal.
Defining Types of Pain
- Psychogenic Pain: Psychalgia or somatoform pain is a physical pain caused, increased, or prolonged by mental, emotional, or behavioral factors. Headache, back pain, or stomach pain are some of the most common types of psychogenic pain.
- Phantom Pain: The pain sensation from a limb or organ that has been lost or from which a person no longer receives physical signals. Phantom limb pain is an experience almost universally reported by amputees and quadriplegics. Phantom pain is neuropathic pain.
- Acute Pain: Pain that comes on quickly can be severe but lasts relatively short. Contrary to chronic pain. Acute pain warns of disease or a threat to the body.
- Chronic Pain: Defined as pain that persists longer than the temporal course of natural healing, associated with a particular type of injury or disease process. Chronic pain impairs the ability to direct attention, particularly compared to peers with low-intensity or no chronic pain; people with high-intensity chronic pain have significantly reduced ability to perform attention-demanding tasks.
Pain Facts and Statistics - Did You Know?
- The brain doesn't feel pain.
- Chronic pain shrinks brains.
- Scientist don't understand pain.
- Pain is both physical and emotional.
- Back pain is the most common pain condition.
- A study of 4,703 patients found that 26% had pain in the last two years of life, increasing to 46% in the last month.
- Pain is the main reason for visiting the emergency department in more than 50% of cases and is present in 30% of family practice visits.
- Several epidemiological studies from different countries have reported varying prevalence rates for chronic pain, ranging from 12 to 80% of the population.
- A survey of 6,636 children (0 to 18 years of age) found that, of the 5,424 respondents, 54% had experienced pain in the preceding three months. A quarter reported having experienced recurrent or continuous pain for three months or more, and a third reported frequent and intense pain. The intensity of chronic pain was higher for girls, and girls' reports of chronic pain increased markedly between ages 12 and 14.