Painful differences between different pain scale assessments: The outcome of assessed pain is a matter of the choices of scale and statistics

Abstract

Perceived pain is a multi-factorial subjective variable, commonly measured by numeric rating scales, verbal descriptive scales (VDS), or by a position on an analogue line (VAS). A major question is whether an individual’s VAS and VDS pain assessments, on the same occasion, could be comparable. The aim was to compare continuous and discretized VAS pain data with verbal descriptive pain datasets from the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) and the European Quality of Life Scale (EQ-5D) in paired pain datasets.

Keywords

• comparability
• ordered categorical data
• non-parametric methods
• numeric rating scale
• pain scales
• paired data
• rank-invariance
• relationship
• verbal descriptive scale
• visual analogue scale