Effective pain control in the postoperative and
emergency department settings depends upon effective pain measurement.
Standard methods involve numerical pain ratings, which have very low
precision. This 5 year NIH-funded project is developing an alternative tool
for measuring acute pain based on pain word descriptors using computerized
adaptive testing. The project database at present has more than 1400
postoperative and emergency department patient records obtained in hospital
and for five days following discharge. Students can analyze existing data
or collect new data to pursue specific hypotheses relevant to the project.
This work emphasizes advanced statistical modeling methods, scaling and
individual differences in acute pain trajectories.
Does this research involve human subjects or animals? Yes
If yes, what is the protocol number? 13196
10/07
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