Abstract

Objective: The aim of the study was to develop a new scale to evaluate pain threshold, severity of chronic pain, and the sensory effects of pain on patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Methods: This study is a scale survey designed in cross-sectional type. A new scale with totally 8 questions were used to data collection. Sixty-one patients were included in this study who were diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in Duzce University-Turkey. The patients were selected voluntarily and matched into the criteria for inclusion into the study. Statistical analyses used were reliability analysis and factor analysis.

Results: There were a total of 6 questions, 3 for very severe pain and 3 for mild pain. The patients were divided into two groups having low and high pain thresholds according to answers to these questions. The other two questions on the scale were used to measure the severity and the sensory effect of pain respectively. The internal consistency between the eight questions of the scale was found high (Alpha coefficient=0.729). There were found a total 3 factors, after factor analysis, one for severe pains, one for mild pains and the last one for severity of pain. In addition, there was no significant difference between two groups having low and high pain thresholds in terms of severity of pain and sensory change due to rheumatoid arthritis. The severity of pain was found to be like headache, toothache and abdominal pain.

Conclusion: The advantages of the new scale include; assessing pain severity more thoroughly and more easily, determining pain threshold, associating pain threshold with pain severity, and comparing the severity of pain caused by the disease with the experienced pain.

Perspective: SH pain scale gives more information to clinicians about the severity of pain, pain effects, and pain threshold. In the literature there is no other scale that evaluates these 3 outcomes together and is easy to implement, easy to understand, and give fast results.

Keywords: Pain threshold; Pain severity; Rheumatoid arthritis; Sensory effects; VAS