Pain clinic experience in a teaching hospital in Western, Saudi Arabia. Relationship of patient's age and gender to various types of pain

OBJECTIVE: To show the practice of a pain clinic in Saudi Arabia, to estimate the prevalence of various types of chronic pain managed in there and to find the relationship of patient's age and gender to type of pain.

METHODS: A retrospective study was carried out over a period of 5 years (January 2000 - December 2004) at a teaching hospital in Jeddah. A total of 1686 patient's data was reviewed, including the giving diagnosis, types of pain and demographic data.

RESULTS: The common age was 50-59 years (25.4%), with a preponderance of female (56.8%) over male (43.2%). For given diagnosis low back pain (LBP) was the most common (45.4%), followed by painful neuralgia (15.6%), headache (9.7%), cancer pain (8.7%), and cervicobrachialgia (8.1%). The prevalence of fibromyalgia (7.9%), headache (12.1%) and cervicobrachialgia (10.7%) was more common among female, in comparison to male (2.4%), (6.4%) and (4.7%) respectively. While painful neuralgia was more frequent among male (19.9%) than female (12.3%), (p<0.001). Low back pain showed higher prevalence among old patients, while headache and sickle cell disease were more common among younger age group. Combined nociceptive and neuropathic pain was the most common pathophysiological type observed (39%), followed by nociceptive pain (36.2%) and the least one was psychological pain (2.7%).

CONCLUSION: Various types of chronic pain managed in the pain clinic requesting full understanding of pain neurophysiology as well as familiarity with contributing factors to the prevalence of pain.