Anxiety measures during induced experimental pain

Results of analgesic studies obtained using experimental pain are often not comparable with those obtained from clinical studies. This may be because anxiety, which plays an important role in the pain experience, may not be evoked by experimentally induced pain. The aim of this study is to measure the level of anxiety induced by the submaximum effort tourniquet technique, which produces pain similar in quality to clinical pain. The mean time that subjects tolerated the pain from the tourniquet was 14.94 minutes. Systolic blood pressure and heart rate increased. Visual analogue scale measures of anxiety showed an overall increase during the experiment but were highly erratic individually. This study suggests that the submaximum effort tourniquet technique is incapable of inducing the same type of anxiety experienced with clinical pain.