Program Overview
Chronic pain is highly prevalent and can have profound negative effects on a patient’s quality of life and functioning, especially when pain is severe. Under treatment is common for a variety of reasons, including underreporting by patients who may not know that help is available or consider pain to be a normal part of life, and healthcare providers’ often incomplete understanding of the number and variety of pain medications currently available for chronic pain. Further complicating this issue are the diverse origins of chronic noncancer pain from conditions such as postherpetic neuralgia, arthritis, low back disorders, surgery, and traumatic injury. Patients with pain of different origins can have distinct responses to individual or broad classes of chronic pain medications, so it is important to appropriately pair the treatment with the type of pain experienced. The breakthrough pain experienced by many patients with otherwise controlled chronic pain provides additional challenges for clinicians developing treatment strategies to achieve adequate pain relief.
Considering the complexity of chronic pain and the speed at which developments are made in the field of pain medicine, this educational activity was designed to disseminate new clinically relevant data regarding strategies and agents for the treatment of chronic noncancer pain to the wide variety of clinicians who are involved in pain management.
This activity will review recent key research on chronic and breakthrough pain from selected posters presented at The American Pain Society (APS) 2007 Annual Scientific Meeting.