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pISSN 2005-9159
eISSN 2093-0569
eISSN 2093-0569
Korean J Pain 2015; 28(4): 265-274
Published online October 31, 2015 https://doi.org/10.3344/kjp.2015.28.4.265
Copyright © The Korean Pain Society.
Sophocles Lanitis*, Christina Mimigianni*, Demetris Raptis, Gionous Sourtse, George Sgourakis, and Constantine Karaliotas
2nd Surgical Department and Unit of Surgical Oncology "Korgialenio-Benakio", Red Cross Athens General Hospital, Greece.
*Department of Anaesthesiology "Korgialenio-Benakio", Red Cross Athens General Hospital, Greece.
Correspondence to: Sophocles Lanitis. 2nd Surgical Department and Unit of Surgical Oncology "Korgialenio-Benakio", Red Cross Athens General Hospital, 1 Athanasaki st. 11526, Athens, Greece. Tel: +30-213-206-8735, Fax: +30-213-206-8616, drlanitis@yahoo.com
Received: January 29, 2015; Revised: June 25, 2015; Accepted: July 2, 2015
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Postoperative (PO) pain interferes with the recovery and mobilization of the surgical patients. The impact of the educational status has not been studied adequately up to now.
This prospective study involved 400 consecutive general surgery patients. Various factors known to be associated with the perception of pain including the educational status were recorded as was the preoperative and postoperative pain and the analgesia requirements for the 1st PO week. Based on the educational status, we classified the patients in 3 groups and we compared these groups for the main outcomes: i.e. PO pain and PO analgesia.
There were 145 patients of lower education (junior school), 150 patients of high education (high school) and 101 of higher education (university). Patients of lower education were found to experience more pain than patients of higher education in all postoperative days (from the 2nd to the 6th). No difference was identified in the type and quantity of the analgesia used. The subgroup analysis showed that patients with depression and young patients (< 40 years) had the maximum effect.
The educational status may be a significant predictor of postoperative pain due to various reasons, including the poor understanding of the preoperative information, the level of anxiety and depression caused by that and the suboptimal request and use of analgesia. Younger patients (< 40), and patients with subclinical depression are mostly affected while there is no impact on patients over 60 years old.
Keywords: Analgesia, Anxiety, Depression, Educational status, General surgery, Postoperative pain, Predictive value of tests, Questionnaires
