Chronic pain can be severely disabling and represents a greatly
underestimated public health problem. “Pain can kill. It can kill the
spirit, vitality and the will to live,” said Joel Saper, MD and
president of the American Headache Society, in response to law the US
Congress passed into provision in late 2000, declaring the following
decade (January 1st 2001 – 2011) as the Decade of Pain Control and
Research. A critical goal of the Decade of Pain initiative was to
maximize the public and professional understanding of pain and pain
management.
Approximately 20% of adult Europeans suffer from chronic pain of
moderate to severe intensity, seriously affecting the quality of their
social and working lives. Neuropathic
pain is thought to be a particularly distressing chronic pain condition
that is often under-diagnosed and under-treated. Neuropathic pain has
been defined as pain arising as a direct consequence of a lesion or
disease affecting the somatosensory system, and is often therapy
resistant for reasons largely unknown. Pain intensity and duration are
reported to be higher in comparison to chronic pain without neuropathic
characteristics. Recently published studies involving epidemiological
surveys in Europe suggested neuropathic pain to have a prevalence of
7–8% in the general population.
Approximately 3-5% of all patients involved in peripheral nerve injury
develop a symptomatic neuroma. In the Netherlands, there are
approximately 3.5/100,000 or 580 new cases of neuropathic pain caused by
traumatic or iatrogenic nerve injury every year.http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/20779/100924_Stokvis%2C%20Annemieke.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment