Personality factors related to the outcome of treatment with transcutaneous nerve stimulation.

Personality factors are known to influence the augmenting/reducing tendency in evoked potentials and also the results obtained from pain-relieving methods in chronic pain conditions. In this study 30 chronic pain patients treated with high frequency transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation were evaluated by means of personality inventories and visual evoked potentials (VEP). The results indicate that the group for whom the treatment had a positive outcome had an augmenting tendency in VEP and also significantly differed as regards certain factors in the EPI (high values in the L scale) and the CMPS (high values in factors I, II, IX, X and index I, V) personality inventories.