Chronic pain assessment using heat beam dolorimetry

Abstract

The heat beam dolorimeter (HBD) was developed to evaluate cutaneous pain thresholds in humans. In the present study, the hypothesis that a patient's underlying pain status affects his pain tolerance to an incident HBD stimulus was tested. Twenty-seven chronic pain patients with a variety of clinical problems unresponsive to conventional algological therapy were scheduled for neurosurgical procedures. These patients were evaluated pre- and postoperatively by the HBD procedure. On initial testing, drug-free pain patients showed significantly higher pain tolerance thresholds than normal volunteers (P less than 0.02, Mann-Whitney U test). Postoperatively, incident pain tolerance thresholds in the HBD test were reduced from pre-surgical levels in these patients and were indistinguishable from the second evaluation latencies of volunteers (P greater than 0.05). Twenty-four of the 27 patients reported significant pain relief following surgery. Our results show that, in chronic pain patients, endogenous pain significantly affected incident pain perception in the HBD test when compared with the responses of normal pain-free volunteers. Consequently, HBD may be useful in objectively assessing chronic pain and its relief by neurosurgical procedures.

Pain threshold and pain recovery after experimental stimulation in patients with burning mouth syndrome

“…The HBD was used to measure the pain perception threshold in patients and control subjects. The HBD is useful in objectively assessing chronic pain 19 . There are a variety of methods for applying stimulation and measuring any subsequent response to investigate the perception of pain in humans.…”

Detectability and Bias Indices of Pneumatic Corneal Stimuli Using Signal Detection Theory

“…58,59 However, the utility of the SDT in somatic, dental, and other areas of pain perception has been demonstrated in several studies. 53,56,58,[60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71] The sensory component of the pain perception is given by the detectability (d ) and the decisional aspects are given by the criterion (c) and likelihood ratios (lnβ). The d provides the participant's ability to detect a stimulus from the background noise, and the location of the c on the decision axis defines the general tendency of the participants to respond yes-no to the trials.…”

Thuncal Hypesthesia in Patients with Minamata Disease.

“…However, in our daily life we usually experience pain sensation to heat stronger on the body or proximal portion than on the distal extremities. Also, the results of Lipman et al suggest that the pain thresholds in the distal portion are higher than in the proximal portion (17,18). The findings here indicate that there was increased pain threshold on both the distal extremities and the truncal portion, suggesting hypalgesia of non-peripheral origin.…”