Establishing a research agenda on standardizing pain measurement in clinical trials in rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMD).
Discussion during a meeting at the Outcome Measures in Rheumatology (OMERACT) 2018, prepared by a systematic review of existing core outcome sets and a patient online survey.
Several key questions were debated: Is pain a symptom or a disease? Are pain core (sub)domains consistent across RMD? How to account for pain mechanistic descriptors (e.g., central sensitization) in pain measurement?
Characterizing and assessing the spectrum of pain experience across RMD in a standardized fashion is the objective of the OMERACT Pain Working Group.