Measuring Chronic Pain Impact

Millions of research dollars have been spent on studies of the effectiveness of interventions for chronic pain, and there is now a growing list of nonpharmacologic therapies being recommended, especially for patients with chronic low back pain. However, to extract the full value of this research investment, including the answer to the question ‘which therapy is most effective?’, we must be able to directly compare results across studies; a task which is hampered by two things: the use of different outcome measures and the lack of a stratification scheme which would allow the case mix of baseline samples to be balanced. This project addresses these challenges by developing crosswalks and/or links between the PROMIS-29 and the legacy measures commonly used in these studies, and by further developing and creating cut-points for a proposed chronic pain impact stratification scheme.