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Pain Disorder: A Biopsychosocial Disease

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Practical Treatment Options for Chronic Pain in Children and Adolescents

Abstract

Pain is an individual and purely subjective experience. Pain processing depends on both somatosensory and emotional brain areas (e.g. the limbic system). Therefore, pain is never a purely sensory perception, but always includes emotional determinants. Finally, the family and other social contexts of the child are important determinants of pain perception. Hence, in order to better understand the origin and maintenance of pain disorders, biological and psychological factors as well as the social environment have to be taken into account. In this chapter, we describe biological, emotional, cognitive and social factors that play a role in the origin, perpetuation and amplification of pain disorders.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    One or a few migraine attacks may be difficult to distinguish from symptomatic migraine-like attacks. Furthermore, the nature of a single or a few attacks may be difficult to understand. Therefore, at least five attacks are required. Individuals who otherwise meet criteria for migraine without aura but have had fewer than five attacks should be coded “Probable migraine without aura”.

  2. 2.

    When the patient falls asleep during migraine and wakes up without it, duration of the attack is reckoned until the time of awakening.

  3. 3.

    In children and adolescents (aged under 18 years), attacks may last 2–72 h (the evidence for untreated durations of less than 2 h in children has not been substantiated).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. German Paediatric Pain Centre, Children’s and Adolescents’ Hospital – Witten/Herdecke University, Datteln, Germany

    Boris Zernikow, Holger Kriszio, Michael Frosch, Michael Dobe & Julia Wager

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  1. Boris Zernikow
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  2. Holger Kriszio
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  3. Michael Frosch
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  4. Michael Dobe
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  5. Julia Wager
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Correspondence to Boris Zernikow .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. German Paediatric Pain Centre, Children’s and Adolescents’ Hospital, Witten/Herdecke University, Datteln, Germany

    Michael Dobe

  2. Department of Children’s Pain Therapy and Paediatric Palliative Care, Faculty of Health, School of Medicine, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany

    Boris Zernikow

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Zernikow, B., Kriszio, H., Frosch, M., Dobe, M., Wager, J. (2019). Pain Disorder: A Biopsychosocial Disease. In: Dobe, M., Zernikow, B. (eds) Practical Treatment Options for Chronic Pain in Children and Adolescents. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19201-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19201-3_2

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