Chronic pain

Chronic pain or chronic pain syndrome is a type of pain that is also known by other titles such as gradual burning pain, electrical pain, throbbing pain, and nauseating pain. This type of pain is sometimes confused with acute pain^[a] and can last from three months to several years; various diagnostic manuals such as DSM-5 and ICD-11 have proposed several definitions of chronic pain, but the accepted definition is that it is "pain that lasts longer than the expected period of recovery."

Creating a pain mechanism prevents possible damage to the body, but chronic pain is a pain without biological value (doesn't have a positive effect). This pain has different divisions; cancer, post-traumatic or surgery, musculoskeletal and visceral are the most important of these divisions. Various factors cause the formation of chronic pain, which can be neurogenic (gene-dependent), nociceptive, neuropathic, psychological or unknown. Some diseases such as diabetes (high blood sugar), shingles (some viral diseases), phantom limb pain, hypertension and stroke also play a role in the formation of chronic pain. The most common types of chronic pain are back pain, severe headache, migraine, and facial pain.

Chronic pain can cause very severe psychological and physical effects that sometimes continue until the end of life. Analysis of the grey matter (damage to brain neurons), insomnia and sleep deprivation, metabolic problems, chronic stress, obesity and heart attack are examples of physical disorder; and depression, cognitive disorders, perceived injustice (PI) and neuroticism are examples of mental disorder.

A wide range of treatments are performed for this disease; drug therapy (types of opioid and non-opioid drugs), cognitive behavioral therapy and physical therapy are the most significant of them. Medicines are usually associated with side effects and are prescribed when the effects of pain become severe. Medicines such as aspirin and ibuprofen are used for milder pain and morphine and codeine for severe pain. Other treatment methods, such as behavioral therapy and physiotherapy, are often used as a supplement along with drugs due to their low effectiveness. There is currently no definitive cure for any of these methods, and research continues into a wide variety of new management and therapeutic interventions, such as nerve block and radiation therapy.

Chronic pain is considered a kind of disease; this type of pain has affected the people of the world more than diabetes, cancer and heart diseases. During several epidemiological studies conducted in different countries, wide differences in the prevalence of chronic pain have been reported from 8% to 55.2% in countries; for example, studies evaluate the incidence in Iran and Canada between 10% and 20% and in the United States between 30% and 40%. The results show that an average of 8% to 11.2% of people in different countries have severe chronic pain, and its epidemic is higher in industrialized countries than in other countries. According to the estimates of the American Medical Association, the costs related to this disease in this country are about 560 to 635 billion dollars.

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