Predicting Postoperative Pain

Despite the recent focus on postoperative opioid prescribing and harm reduction strategies, the underlying problem of persistent postoperative pain still needs to be addressed. We lack a unifying explanation for why some patients continue having pain, while others do not, because the factors shaping postoperative pain trajectories are highly complex. Consequently, we are unable to identify which patients are at risk for persistent postoperative pain, and how to prevent its development and progression. The complexity of underlying processes has undermined the development of cohesive and personalized treatment paradigms. The current approach for assessing the complex interaction between pain and biopsychosocial factors has focused on small subgroups, making it challenging to broadly apply findings. While several frameworks to assess key elements of pain outcomes have been developed, efforts are stalled by the challenges of operationalizing these to develop large-scale prediction and risk assessment frameworks.