Research Letter

Improving pain management in elderly patients with dementia: validation of the Doloshort observational pain assessment scale SIR—More than half of older adults report pain affecting their quality of life [1]. Self-assessment cannot be imple-mented in patients with limited communication abilities due to severe dementia [2, 3]. To address this issue, standardised observational pain scales have been designed but they may be relatively lengthy and their validity has not always been verified. A very brief validated tool could greatly enhance pain evaluation in busy clinical practices and could also help shorten more comprehensive geriatric and oncological assessments of such patients. In a prior study, we demonstrated that Doloplus-2 cor