Transition from acute to chronic pain in children novel pieces of the puzzle

摘要

Traumatic pain has a clear onset after, eg, a trauma causing a fracture. Nontraumatic pain covers the pain conditions where there is no clear onset of pain but a gradual increase in symptoms over days and weeks. Despite adolescent pain being less studied, it seems that adolescents with a traumatic onset of pain have a better prognosis compared with pain with nontraumatic onset.2'10 The causes of nontraumatic pain among adolescents are largely unexplored but believed to be the result of a high or rapid increases in sports and physical activity beyond what the body may tolerate.12 An open question is whether adolescent pain arising from trauma is similar to nontraumatic pain due to repetitive overuse. Moreover, do the findings reported by Holley et al.4 regarding traumatic pain apply to with a nontraumatic onset? Recent studies show that more than 50% of adolescents with knee pain still experience knee pain after 2 years, and the strongest individual prognostic factors are baseline measures of the frequency of pain, pain duration, quality of life, and sex (with young women having a higher risk of pain after 2 years).