[Clinical characteristics and multidisciplinary management of chronic musculoskeletal pain]

Musculoskeletal disorders are the most common causes of severe long-term pain and physical disability, affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world. In industrialized countries, which have increasingly aging populations, chronic musculoskeletal pain has become a significant health care burden and major issue in the 1980s and 1990s. On January 13, 2000, The Bone and Joint Decade was formally launched at the headquarters of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. This global campaign aimed to improve the quality of life for people who have musculoskeletal conditions. Complying with this trend, large-scale surveys have been conducted in Europe and the US in recent years to evaluate the effect of chronic pain on society, but in Japan, there has been a paucity of basic information on the status of chronic musculoskeletal pain. We organized a postal survey designed to quantify and describe the prevalence and distribution of chronic pain in the Japanese community. We found that chronic pain of moderate to severe intensity occurs in 17.2%. Chronic pain had a significant impact on the occupational and social relationships, and it seriously affected their psychological conditions and quality of life. Such disabling chronic pain is regarded as the result of interrelated physical, psychological, and social or occupational factors requiring multidisciplinary intervention. We introduce a multidisciplinary clinical approach and report on novel multimodal methodologies -- for patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain.