De-STRESS pain (stage 2)

  • Research type

    Research Study

  • Full title

    Exploring how peoples’ experiences of pain relate to emotions and experiences of stress: A questionnaire study.

  • IRAS ID

    303304

  • Contact name

    Tamar Pincus

  • Contact email

    t.pincus@rhul.ac.uk

  • Sponsor organisation

    Royal Holloway, University of London

  • Duration of Study in the UK

    0 years, 11 months, 31 days

  • Research summary

    People with chronic musculoskeletal pain often feel low, exhausted, irritable and have trouble to do the things they usually do. This may be identified by GPs as depression, and therefore patients are prescribed anti-depressants. However, the distress related to chronic musculoskeletal pain is different from clinical depression - many patients don’t want antidepressants, and don't improve after being prescribed them. This project aims to find a set of questions to help to identify patients with pain related distress as opposed to clinical depression.

    This will be done through cross-sectional questionnaire methods. Patients with SNOMED codes for either chronic musculoskeletal pain, depression or both will be recruited. We will analyse responses to the questionnaire to identify the key questions that separate patients into different groups. We anticipate identifying four groups of patients: a) people with chronic pain and clinical depression; b) people with chronic pain and pain-related distress, but not clinical depression; c) people with clinical depression but not chronic pain; and d) people with chronic pain but neither pain-related distress nor clinical depression.

  • REC name

    South Central - Hampshire B Research Ethics Committee

  • REC reference

    21/SC/0379

  • Date of REC Opinion

    5 Jan 2022

  • REC opinion

    Further Information Favourable Opinion