Non-ulcer upper dyspepsia. Aspects of pain

Subjects with upper abdominal pain without any demonstrable organic basis are often met with the attitude that the pain is "not real'. Twenty-five patients with long-standing upper abdominal pain but with normal findings on X-ray examination, gastroduodenoscopy, and relevant blood analyses were examined with pain-measuring techniques. Two fundamentally different techniques--pain estimate on a visual analogue scale and magnitude matching by submaximal effort tourniquet technique, respectively--gave correlating values for pain intensity (r = 0.70; P less than 0.001), indicating that these patients' asserted pain actually is "real'. Values for pain tolerance, measured with the submaximal effort tourniquet technique, were compared with pain tolerance in a group of healthy volunteers and were found to be three times lower (P less than 0.001) in the patient group. A methodological study of the submaximal effort tourniquet technique was performed on the healthy volunteers. The method was found to be suitable for use in pain studies, since the pain produced gradually increased as a linear function of time.