Chronic Pain Epidemiology: From Aetiology to Public Health

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.

Chronic Pain Epidemiology - From Aetiology to Public Health provides an invaluable framework and basis for thinking about chronic pain and the potential for its prevention in public health terms. It will appeal to readers from public health, epidemiology and policy perspectives, and those involved in the treatment of pain - such as pain researchers, clinicians and specialists. It will also be an invaluable resource for postgraduate students studying pain management, public health, and 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.