Outcome assessment in chronic non-cancer pain treatment

Increased literacy of the pain research community concerning the formal requirements of assessment instruments - reliability, validity and sensitivity to change - means that assessment can now be addressed with reference to underlying dilemmas both about techniques of measurement and its targets. This commentary on outcome assessment is intended to facilitate the choice of measures, from an imperfect field, by raising some of those problems. It deals first with summary measures, and then with the separate domains of pain experience, affect, cognition and coping, behavior and activity, social role interference, biological and fitness measures, and use of health care, addressing in particular the conceptual basis of each.