Demographic Characteristics, Psychosocial Measures, and Pain in a Sample of Patients with Persistent Pain Referred to a New Zealand Tertiary Pain Medicine Center
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Little is known on epidemiology of chronic pain in New Zealand. Its management has been based on data and models in North American/European studies. This project evaluated demographic and psychosocial correlates of pain severity, duration, and disability (PSDD) in chronic pain patients for assessment at a New Zealand tertiary care Pain Medicine Center. DESIGN AND SETTING: This study was a retrospective, cross-sectional analysis on existing clinical assessment data (audit) collected over an 18-month period. METHODS: Pre-admission data were collected on a consecutive series of 874 patients presenting for assessment. ASSESSMENT TOOLS: This included demographic (gender, educational attainment, ethnicity) and psychosocial data. Pain severity was measured by numerical rating scale and present pain intensity using McGill Pain Questionnaire. Duration was measured in months. Disability was measured by using Pain Disability Index and depression using the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale. Distress was measured using the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale and self-efficacy using the Pain Self-Efficacy Questionnaire. Catastrophizing was measured by Coping Strategies Questionnaire and pain acceptance by the Pain Solutions Questionnaire. RESULTS: No difference was found in mean values of all PSDD between genders and between ethnicities. Years of education did not form an important correlate of PSDD. Catastrophizers experienced more pain and were more disabled. Patients with severe pain experienced greater distress. Depressed patients were more disabled. Patients presenting with a high degree of self-efficacy were likely to have lower pain levels and to be less disabled. Level of acceptance of pain was positively associated with reported duration of pain and negatively associated with total disability. CONCLUSION: Through this study, more is now known about effects of chronic pain on New Zealanders. The use of validated psychometric testing enables proper assessment and informs clinical management for chronic pain patients.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".