Pain in Europe VIII – 8th EFIC Congress, 9–12 October 2013, Florence
ITALIAN STUDY: TWO IN THREE CHRONIC PAIN PATIENTS ARE FEMALE
Two-thirds of the patients attending specialised pain clinics are female, according to an Italian multi-centre study which was presented at the Congress of the European Pain Federation EFIC in Florence. A third of chronic pain patients, of both sexes, suffer from intense pain.
Florence, 10 October 2013 – More than two-thirds of chronic pain patients attending specialized pain clinics are female, and chronic pain increases with age. These are results of a new Italian study by eight pain clinics specializing in the multidisciplinary management of chronic pain conditions; it was presented at the Congress of the European Pain Federation EFIC in Florence.
“The treatment of chronic pain is complex and makes a multidisciplinary approach necessary”, said the author of the study, Dr Roberto Latina of Sapienzia University, Rome. In Italy, a special law on pain treatment (Law 38/2010) tasks the delivery of multidisciplinary treatment of chronic pain to a network of specialised pain clinics, which, said Dr Latina, “supply different levels of complex assistance.”
The study, carried out in pain clinics in the Lazio region of Italy, was aimed at describing the socio-demographic and other characteristics of chronic pain patients at such centres.
Data from 1,606 patients were analysed, 32.7% men and 67.3% women. For both genders, the most representative age was between 60 and 65 years (34%). More than a third of the patients suffered from severe pain, another 25% from moderate pain. The most important pain condition was found to be nociceptive pain with 48.4%, next to mixed pain (29.4%) and neuropathic pain (16.7%). Another important finding, according to Dr Latina: “Even after the promulgation of Law 38/2010, the trend is still not to measure pain in all patients, with a rate of 75%.”
Source: EFIC Abstract Latina et al, Characteristics of the adult population who attend centres of pain clinics in Italy
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