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Illness behaviors may be the best pain predictors for carpal tunnel syndrome

Nunez F. Clin Orthop Relat Res. doi:10.1007/s11999-010-1551-x.

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Illness behavior — specifically depression and misinterpreting the ability to feel pain — predicted pain intensity in patients with carpal tunnel syndrome, according to investigators from Boston.

Fiesky Nunez, MD, and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston included 54 patients in their study. All patients completed a measure of tendency to misinterpret pain, a measure of depressive symptoms, anxiety about pain, self-efficacy in response to pain and a 5-point Likert measure of pain intensity. The investigators performed a one-tailed Spearman correlation to find a correlation between pain and continuous variables; they performed a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to evaluate the differences between categorical variables.

The results did not show a relationship between gender, age and electrophysiologic measures and pain intensity. After they correlated all measures of illness behavior with pain intensity, the investigators entered the measures into a multiple linear regression model. Those results showed that only misinterpretation of nociception and depression were significantly associated with pain.