Pain in the Blood? Envisioning Mechanism-Based Diagnoses and Biomarkers in Clinical Pain Medicine

Diagnostics

Emmanuel Bäckryd¹ 

[1] Division of Community Medicine, Department of Medical and Health Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, Linköping University, SE-581 85 Linköping, Sweden

关键词: biomarker;    biopsychosocial;    diagnosis;    neuropathic;    nociception;    nociceptive;    pain;   

DOI  :  10.3390/diagnostics5010084

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Chronic pain is highly prevalent, and pain medicine lacks objective biomarkers to guide diagnosis and choice of treatment. The current U.S. “opioid epidemic” is a reminder of the paucity of effective and safe treatment options. Traditional pain diagnoses according to the International Classification of Diseases are often unspecific, and analgesics are often prescribed on a trial-and-error basis. In contrast to this current state of affairs, the vision of future mechanism-based diagnoses of chronic pain conditions is presented in this non-technical paper, focusing on the need for biomarkers and the theoretical complexity of the task. Pain is and will remain a subjective experience, and as such is not objectively measurable. Therefore, the concept of “noci-marker” is presented as an alternative to “pain biomarker”, the goal being to find objective, measurable correlates of the pathophysiological processes involved in different chronic pain conditions. This vision entails a call for more translational pain research in order to bridge the gap between clinical pain medicine and preclinical science.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.