Chronic Pain: Cause, Prevention, and Management
Pain medicine represents an important medical issue not only in anesthesiology, but also with a transversal interest covering several conditions in medicine, including neuroscience, physiology, rehabilitation, and pharmacology. Chronic pain is a long-standing pain affecting a huge group of population worldwide, with most common conditions including low back pain, cancer pain, arthritis pain, headaches, neuronal pain disorders, and post-operative pain. This Article Collection will be covering some of the issues that are more relevant for the pain physicians.
Understanding the causes and mechanisms of chronic pain conditions is essential for pain relief interventions, prevention, and treatment. Revealing the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms of chronic pain will provide targeted strategies for proposing medical rehabilitative methods and combatting chronic pain. However, the mechanisms could be complex in many disease conditions, until now poorly described and underexplored.
Chronic pain has different interesting facets, in which one of the most intriguing aspects is its prevention. The influence of acute pain on the incidence of chronic pain represents an intriguing and challenging field of research. This is important for several conditions, starting from the post-operative or post-traumatic acute pain, which are tightly associated with subsequent chronic pain conditions via various mechanisms. The prevention of chronic pain is important to ensure the quality of life of patients in clinical medicine, and in the social health care system.
For the management of chronic pain, certain medications and treatments offer various medical options for pain relief. The management strategy varies among patients with different disease conditions. An increasing attention toward the pathology and syndrome would be beneficial to relieve the suffering of patients, with more effective medications and better treatment outcomes. Therefore, monitoring of patients with chronic pain would also be a key to an increased success in terms of chronic pain management.
For this Article Collection, the goal is to solicit submission of any articles to showcase the causes, mechanisms, prevention, management, and related research on chronic pain, including laboratory investigations, clinical trials, and literature reviews, and to stimulate the interest and to broaden the horizons of anesthesiologists, pain physicians, and researchers to monitor chronic pain in the patients.
Guest advisors
Prof. Giustino Varrassi(Paolo Procacci Foundation, Roma, Italy)
Prof. Omar Viswanath(Creighton University School of Medicine, Omaha, Nebraska, USA)