Traumatic events, post-traumatic stress disorder, and proxy measures for central sensitization in chronic pain patients of a German university outpatient pain clinic

This dataset was acquired at Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany. The study complied with the Declaration of Helsinki, and was approved by the local ethics committee. All subjects gave written informed consent, and consent to use their data anonymously for research purposes. The study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT05190367).

Between February 2019 and July 2020, 914 patients who visited our outpatient pain department gave written consent to use their routinely collected data anonymously for research purposes. Participants were divided into four groups depending on their trauma severity: (1) no trauma; (2) accidental trauma (e.g. illness, accident, natural disaster); (3) interpersonal trauma (e.g. assault, rape, war); (4) PTSD (diagnosed according to ICD-10). Patients fulfilling two or more categories were assigned to the highest group.

Data were collected using the SymptomMapper application [1]. Participants provided information about their traumas, current pain intensity (visual analogue scale, VAS (0-100) [2]), mean and maximal pain in the last 4 weeks (VAS (0-100)), sleep impairment (VAS (0-100)), acceptable pain (VAS (0-100)), pain disability index (PDI [3]), pain area (digital drawings), pain widespreadness (widespread pain index, WPI [4], derived from drawings), stress (patient health questionnaire, German version, PHQ-D [5]), anxiety (PHQ-D), depression (PHQ-D), and somatization symptoms (PHQ-D).

This dataset contains the raw data as well as necessary scripts for reproducing the results of this study.

References
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[5] Löwe B, Spitzer RL, Zipfel S, Herzog W. Gesundheitsfragebogen für Patienten (PHQ-D). Manual und Testunterlagen (second edition). Pfizer 2002.