Chronic Pain Epidemiology

Peter Croft studied social anthropology, qualified and worked as a general practitioner, and trained as an epidemiologist. His research interests concern the causes, course and treatment of common syndromes of musculoskeletal pain as they occur in the community and in primary care. He directs the Arthritis Research Campaign's National Primary Care Centre, a multidisciplinary group of clinicians and researchers located at Keele University in the UK. He is an associate editor of the journal Pain. The Centre at Keele directed by Peter Croft was awarded a Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in 2009.Dr Fiona Blyth is a medical epidemiologist and public health physician. She is Head of Pain Epidemiology at the University of Sydney Pain Management Research Institute, Royal North Shore Hospital and at the Centre for Education and Research on Ageing, Concord Hospital, both in Sydney, Australia. She has been involved with large-scale population studies on the size and impact of chronic pain in the community. She has academic appointments at the University of Sydney and the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), where she was the inaugural James C Petrie Fellow in 2006.Danielle van der Windt's research activities focus on the epidemiology of pain in the community, and the diagnosis, prognosis and management of musculoskeletal disorders and other common symptoms in primary care. She has been involved in the design and conduct of several prospective cohort studies investigating the influence of physical, occupational and psychosocial factors on the prognosis of shoulder pain, neck pain, upper extremity disorders, hip or knee problems. She has a strong interest in research methodology, and is involved in research exploring methods to design and validate prediction models. Other interests concern the methodology of systematic reviews of diagnostic, prognostic and intervention research. She provides methodological support to health care professionals and researchers to undertake research on common musculoskeletal pain conditions, and has been involved in the development of clinical guidelines in this field.

• Contributors ; SECTION 1: BASIC IDEAS ; 1. Chronic pain as a topic for epidemiology and public health ; 2. The global occurrence of chronic pain: an introduction ; 3. The demography of chronic pain: an overview ; Appendix to Section 1: Basic epidemiological concepts applied to pain ; SECTION 2: DEFINITION AND MEASUREMENT OF CHRONIC PAIN FOR POPULATION STUDIES ; 4. Introduction ; 5. Measuring chronic pain in populations ; 6. Measuring the impact of chronic pain on populations: a narrative review ; 7. Number of pain sites - a simple measure of population risk? ; SECTION 3: MECHANISMS ; 8. The genetic epidemiology of pain ; 9. The biological response to stress and chronic pain ; 10. Musculoskeletal pain complaints from a sex and gender perspective ; SECTION 4: COMMON PAIN SYNDROMES ; 11. Introduction ; 12. The symptom of pain in populations ; 13. Headache ; 14. Pain in children ; 15. Life-course influences on chronic pain in adults ; 16. Pain in older people ; SECTION 5: PAIN AND DISEASE ; 17. Disease-related pain: an introduction ; 18. Neuropathic pain ; 19. Post-surgical pain ; 20. Chronic chest pain, myocardial ischaemia and coronary artery disease phenotypes ; 21. Cancer and chronic pain ; SECTION 6: PUBLIC HEALTH AND CHRONIC PAIN ; 22. Introduction to chronic pain as a public health problem ; 23. Pharmacological treatment: the example of osteoarthritis ; 24. The potential for prevention: occupation ; 25. Can we change a population's perspective on pain? ; 26. The potential for prevention: overview ; Index