[Cancer pain in hospitalized patients]

In spite of increased knowledge in palliative care, there are still cancer patients who do not receive adequate pain relief. There is limited information on cancer pain experience in Norwegian hospitals. More data is needed in order to understand why barriers still exist to adequate pain management.

We performed a one-day prevalence study of cancer pain in all hospitalized patients in the southern health region of Norway. A questionnaire based on the Brief Pain Inventory was used.

309 patients were included. 40% used no analgesics. 51 % reported having pain while hospitalized; mean pain level on the visual analogue scale over the last 24 hours was 2.6. 70 patients reported strong to intolerable pain (visual analogue scale > or = 5), and 27 of these patients did not use opioids. 104 patients reported symptoms consistent with neuropathic pain, but only 7 used relevant co-analgesics. 102 patients reported break-through pain. Patients with neuropathic pain and break-through pain scored significantly higher on pain and significantly worse on all global variables like quality of sleep, daily activity, and ability to work.

Many cancer patients still have pain, possibly because of inadequate medication. Key words for improvement are better knowledge, higher professional awareness, and systematic symptom assessment and pain analysis.