We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Pain drawings in somatoform-functional pain.
- Authors
Egloff, Niklaus; Cámara, Rafael J. A.; von Känel, Roland; Klingler, Nicole; Marti, Elizabeth; Ferrari, Marie-Louise Gander
- Abstract
Background: Pain drawings are a diagnostic adjunct to history taking, clinical examinations, and biomedical tests in evaluating pain. We hypothesized that somatoform-functional pain, is mirrored in distinctive graphic patterns of pain drawings. Our aim was to identify the most sensitive and specific graphic criteria as a tool to help identifying somatoform-functional pain. Methods: We compared 62 patients with somatoform-functional pain with a control group of 49 patients with somatic-nociceptive pain type. All patients were asked to mark their pain on a pre-printed body diagram. An investigator, blinded with regard to the patients' diagnoses, analyzed the drawings according to a set of numeric or binary criteria. Results: We identified 13 drawing criteria pointing with significance to a somatoform-functional pain disorder (all p-values ⩽ 0.001). The most specific and most sensitive criteria combination for detecting somatoform-functional pain included the total number of marks, the length of the longest mark, and the presence of symmetric patterns. The area under the ROC-curve was 96.3% for this criteria combination. Conclusion: Pain drawings are an easy-to-administer supplementary technique which helps to identify somatoform-functional pain in comparison to somatic-nociceptive pain.
- Subjects
PAIN; SOMATOFORM disorders; DRAWING; SOMATIC cells; SENSES
- Publication
BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, 2012, Vol 13, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
1471-2474
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1186/1471-2474-13-257