Evaluation and assessment of cancer pain and cancer pain treatment

Evaluation and assessment are the first steps of any strategy for the manag ement of cancer pain, and are fundamental for any clinical research project in this field. Different clinical systems for evaluation and classificatio n of cancer pain syndromes are available and their clinical usefulness shou ld be tested. The measurement of pain intensity is necessary to document an d assess the outcome of established and new treatments. Visual analogue sca les, verbal and numerical rating scales and some multidimensional tools suc h as the Brief Pain Inventory and the McGill Pain Questionnaire are helpful in the assessment of cancer pain provided the limitations of their validit y are considered. Specific questions arise when these tools are used in lon g-term repeated assessments of cancer patients. Assessment and measuring te chniques deserve more investigations to optimize standard valid procedures and to enable us to exchange clinical information and produce comparable da ta in research.