The Pain Descriptors Used by Individuals with Musculoskeletal Pain from Northern India.

BACKGROUND

Chronic pain is a common health problem worldwide that results in significant costs to society and has negative impacts on the individuals with chronic pain. In order to study and treat pain, valid and reliable pain assessment is necessary, including assessment of pain quality. However, all of the most commonly used measures of pain quality were developed in Western countries. Evidence has shown that some of these measures are not content valid for use in non-Western countries. Moreover, it remains unclear which pain descriptors are universal across people from different countries who speak different languages, and which are specific to individuals from a particular country or even from a particular region within one country.

AIM

The current study sought to: (1) identify the number and frequency of words used by native speakers of Hindi in northern India to describe their pain; (2) compare the rates of descriptor use in these individuals with samples of individuals from Nepal and the USA; and (3) investigate the content validity of the most commonly used pain quality measures for measuring pain in this Hindi-speaking population.

METHODS

Two hundred and forty individuals with chronic musculoskeletal pain who speak and understand Hindi were asked to describe their pain.

RESULTS

The results showed overlap as well as differences in the words used to describe pain with samples of individuals with pain from other countries. Moreover, of the pain quality measures examined were found to be content valid in the Hindi-speaking sample, suggesting that these measures need to be adapted to assess pain quality in this population.

CONCLUSION

The study findings confirm the conclusion that pain quality measures developed in one country or in one pain population are not necessarily valid for assessing pain quality in a population from another country. The findings also suggest the possibility that a measure could be developed which would allow for more valid assessment of pain quality in individuals with pain from different countries.