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Continuous Pain Score Metre Accurately Measures Pain During Procedures HOBOKEN, NJ -- March 9, 2009 -- A study appearing in the journal Pain Practice has successfully established the reliability of the continuous pain score metre (CPSM) for assessing pain. The device enables continuous real time pain score measurement, which can be used to obtain exact measurements of pain intensity in humans during the course of clinical procedures that last between 1 to 30 minutes. The findings also provide more detailed information on patients' pain perception and may lead to better pain management for certain clinical procedures. Currently, the visual analogue score (VAS) is the most widely used scale for diagnostic and technical procedures to evaluate patient tolerance in an office setting. However, according to the authors this method has 3 major disadvantages: (1) If a procedure consists of multiple different actions, pain intensity may vary according to each action, and this important information is not detected by a single measurement afterwards; (2) Pain intensity measurements after the procedure may be biased by the inaccuracy of the memory to recall pain sensations; (3) Pain sensation does not suddenly stop after a stimulus, but gradually disappears, requiring continuous measurements in order to fully cover the pain sensation. With the new pain score metre it is possible to measure pain continuously throughout the procedure, therefore allowing clinicians to gain more insight into the patients' pain perception. The study used 32 healthy volunteers who received a reproducible pain stimulus at 1-minute intervals. The stimulus was induced by a dolorimeter. During the stimulus, pain was continuously measured with the CPSM, providing values of peak continuous pain score (peak CPS) and area under the continuous pain score curve (AUC CPS). "The additional knowledge provided by the CPSM can be very helpful in clinical settings to optimise the use of local analgesia in diagnostic or therapeutic procedures or to adapt the technique into more tolerable procedures," said coauthor Paul van Kesteren, MD, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. "Therefore, the CPSM seems to be a better option than conventional techniques for real-time continuous measurement of a subject's pain intensity with adequate reliability." SOURCE: Wiley-Blackwell E-mail this page to a friend or colleague! To print, use this version