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The following is a summary of “Measurement of the Association of Pain with Clinical Characteristics in Oral Cancer Patients at Diagnosis and Prior to Cancer Treatment,” published in the February 2024 issue of Pain by Sawicki et al.
The University of California San Francisco Oral Cancer Pain Questionnaire (UCSFOCPQ), explicitly designed to assess oral cancer pain, measures intensity, nature, and functional impairment in patients experiencing pain at the tumor site, thus impacting their QoL.
Researchers conducted a retrospective study comparing pain reported by untreated oral cancer patients using the UCSFOCPQ, designed explicitly for oral cancer, with the Brief Pain Inventory (BPI), a general cancer pain tool.
They analyzed the correlation between pain, measured by the UCSFOCPQ and the BPI, and clinical characteristics in thirty newly diagnosed oral cancer patients.
The results showed concordant pain severity measurements between the UCSFOCPQ and BPI. However, the widely used BPI average pain over 24 hours score, with a sensitivity of less than 24%, showed reduced effectiveness in detecting associations of oral cancer pain with clinical characteristics (nodal status, depth of invasion [DOI]) before treatment. A BPI average score, encompassing pain severity and interference with function, demonstrated comparable performance to the UCSFOCPQ in detecting associations with nodal status, pathologic T stage (pT stage), stage, and DOI.
Investigators concluded that measuring sensory and interference aspects of oral cancer pain yielded stronger correlations with patients’ biological and clinical characteristics.
