Pain expectations in neuropathic pain: Is it best to be optimistic?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Pain expectancy may be an important variable that has been found to influence the effectiveness of treatments for pain. Much of the literature supports a self-fulfilment perspective where expectations for pain relief predict the actual pain experienced. However, in conditions such as neuropathic pain (NeP) where pain relief is difficult to attain, expectations for pain relief could be unrealistic. The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between realistic/unrealistic expectations and 6-month, post-treatment outcomes. METHODS: We performed a retrospective analysis of a large cohort of patients with NeP (n = 789) attending tertiary care centres to determine the association between unrealistic (both positive and negative) and realistic expectations with outcomes after multidisciplinary treatment. An expectation variable with three categories was calculated: realistic expectations were those whose expected reduction in pain was similar to the observed mean group reduction in pain, while optimistic and pessimistic expectations were those who over- or under-estimated the expected response to treatment, respectively. The association between baseline realistic/unrealistic expectations and 6-month pain-related disability, catastrophizing and psychological distress was assessed. RESULTS: Univariable analyses suggested that realistic expectations were associated with lower levels of disability, catastrophizing and psychological distress, compared to unrealistic expectations. However, after adjustment for baseline symptom severity, multivariable analysis revealed that patients with optimistic expectations had lower levels of disability, than those with realistic expectations. Those with pessimistic expectations had higher levels of catastrophizing and psychological distress at follow-up. CONCLUSIONS: These findings are largely congruent with the self-fulfilment perspective to expectations. SIGNIFICANCE: This study defined realistic pain expectations with patient data. Examining the relationship between expectations between pain and disability in a large cohort of patients with neuropathic pain.
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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 | 0.024 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".