Phenotypic Characterization of Chronic Neuropathic Pain Following Post-Traumatic and Post-Surgical Injury

More than 300 million surgeries are performed worldwide each year. Chronic pain after surgery typically lasts for more than 3 months after the operation, has a different feeling, and is often more intense than pain before surgery. This type of pain occurs in every one or two of 10 surgical patients and is intolerable after roughly one of every 100 operations. This serious pain is more common after some types of surgery like those where the operation occurs in the chest to treat lung or breast cancer and influences how often this problem occurs and the severity of the pain. Nerve injury- related pain is a factor in one third of these patients. There is great unmet need for non-opioid analgesics for the treatment of nerve injury-related pain. A major barrier to optimizing treatment matching is a limited understanding of the relationship between sensory features identified on exam and by history and underlying pain mechanism. Additional study of this robustly phenotyped cohort with post surgical and post traumatic neuropathic pain will address this barrier to improved pain diagnosis and treatment matching as well as superior clinical trial designs.