Ability of patients to accurately recall the severity of acute painful events

Objective: Pain studies require prospective patient enrollment, to ensure a ccurate pain assessment. The authors correlated pain assessments of an acut e painful episode over a one-week period and determined the accuracy of pat ient pain severity recall over time. Methods: This was a prospective, descr iptive, longitudinal study. Participants were a convenience sample of 50 em ergency department patients with acute pain resulting from injuries or pain ful invasive procedures. A trained research assistant administered a struct ured pain survey containing demographic and historical features to all pati ents. Patients sequentially assessed their pain severity using a vertical 1 00-mm visual analog scale marked "most pain" at the top, a verbal numeric r ating scale ranging from 0 to 100 from none to worst (NRS100), and a verbal numeric rating scale ranging from 0 to 10 from none to worst (NRS10). Pati ents were contacted by phone and asked to reassess their initial pain sever ity one and seven days later using the two verbal numeric rating scales. An alysis of pain assessments using the various scales at the three time inter vals was performed with Pearson's and Spearman's coefficients and repeated- measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results: There were 50 patients with a mean age of 41 years. Correlation between initial pain assessments on th e three scales ranged from 0.83 to 0.92. Correlations between the initial a nd 24-hour assessments were NRS100-0.98 and NRS10-0.98. Correlations betwee n the initial, and one-week assessments were NRS100-0.96 and NRS10-0.97. Re peated-measures ANOVA showed no significant change in pain assessments over time for both verbal numeric scales. Conclusions: Pain severity assessment s of acute painful events one and seven days later were similar and highly correlated with initial assessments using both verbal numeric scales. Patie nts accurately recall the severity of an acute painful episode for at least one week after its occurrence, which may allow retrospective pain assessme nts.