Prediction of postoperative pain: a systematic review of predictive experimental pain studies

Quantitative testing of a patient’s basal pain perception before surgery has the potential to be of clinical value if it can accurately predict the magnitude of pain and requirement of analgesics after surgery. This review includes 14 studies that have investi-gated the correlation between preoperative responses to experi-mental pain stimuli and clinical postoperative pain and demon-strates that thepreoperativepain testsmaypredict 4–54%of the variance in postoperative pain experience depending on the stimulationmethods and the test paradigmused.The predictive strength is much higher than previously reported for single fac-tor analyses of demographics and psychologic factors. In addi-tion, some of these studies indicate that an increase in preoper-ative pain sensitivity is associated with a high probability of development of sustained postsurgical pain