Lung Cancer Pain Quality Descriptors: More Similarities Than Differences by Patient Characteristics

Pain quality is a window to pathophysiologic, affective, and cognitive processes, but little is known about the specific descriptors of lung cancer pain quality or their associations with patient characteristics or tumor stage. The study purpose was to examine pain quality descriptors in patients with lung cancer for their associations with demographic and disease-related characteristics.

Descriptive, comparative study of existing de-identified datasets.

Outpatient oncology clinics and home settings in three Western states and one Midwestern state. The analysis included 453 patients with lung cancer. All patients completed the McGill Pain Questionnaire under standard conditions.

At least 10% of the patients selected 41 of the 78 pain quality descriptors, including 23 sensory, 5 affective, 5 evaluative, and 8 miscellaneous descriptors. Of these 41 descriptors, 16 were indicative of nociceptive pain, and 13 were indicative of neuropathic pain. Eleven descriptors were associated with age (tight, cold), race (hurting, unbearable, pinching, drilling, killing), education (sharp), or stage (exhausting, squeezing, lancinating), but none were significantly associated with sex.

The frequently selected pain quality descriptors and the pain context for this large, aggregated lung cancer sample are on par with normative scores for cancer pain. Males and females describe lung cancer pain quality similarly. Other demographic or cancer stage characteristics show minimal influence on selection of pain quality descriptors.