Preceding Pain and Development of Additional Pain in Patients With CRPS

Overview

Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) is a very painful condition that can have a huge impact on people's lives. Despite progress having been made in understanding what CRPS is and how it affects people, there are still many questions that remain unanswered. Research plays an important role in helping healthcare professionals understand illness and develop new treatments. The purpose of this study is to contribute to understanding of CRPS, specifically by seeing whether there are links between CRPS and other chronic pains. A study done at the Walton Centre in the past suggested that there may be some links, which the investigators will re-examine in this study in more detail, as well as asking other important questions which may bring new information to light.

This cross-sectional study will use a questionnaire-based method to gather information on pre-existing pain, before CRPS development, at the same site where CRPS then develops, and on additional pain (pre-existing or later developing) from a large cohort of patients with CRPS. This will allow a large amount of data to be collected in a time-efficient manner and enable comparison between different groups, for example, those who developed widespread pain before or after their diagnosis of CRPS. The investigators know from existing research that widespread pain is a relatively common phenomenon in patients with CRPS; on this basis they expect its frequency in the cohort to be such that they may be able to detect statistically significant patterns in its development, for example a different frequency in certain age groups. Thus the questionnaire will feature questions about the patient's CRPS diagnosis and any additional pain they have experienced, including its time course of development and nature. It will also include questions about other symptoms that are more commonly observed in chronic widespread pain than in CRPS, such as cognitive symptoms and sleep disturbance, and which form part of the ACR 2016 criteria for fibromyalgia syndrome diagnosis. Independently, given the unexpected finding of CRPS-preceding pains in the later CRPS-affected limb in a previous Walton Centre study, the investigators will also more systematically evaluate this phenomenon.

Conditions