Chronic pain epidemiology

"Chronic pain is a major cause of distress, disability, and work loss, and it is becoming increasingly prevalent through the general move towards an ageing population, which impacts dramatically upon society and health care systems worldwide. Due to improvements in health care, it is becoming more common for patients to continue living with long-term illness or disease (rather than these being terminal). Yet little attention has been paid to chronic pain as a public health problem or to the potential for its prevention, even though it can be studied and assessed using concepts and ideas from classical epidemiology. This book takes an unusual approach in making a symptom the focus of public health research and policy. Written by leaders in the field of pain, it fills a gap in current literature by presenting chronic pain in terms of cause, impact, consequence and prevention. It presents individual conditions as examples of chronic pain, together with chapters that provide overviews on the assessment of pain and methodological issues behind population assessment. <em>Chronic Pain Epidemiology - From Aetiology to Public Health</em> provides an invaluable framework and basis for thinki