The epidemiology of complex regional pain syndrome

The landmark paper discussed in this chapter describes a retrospective study examining the epidemiology of complex regional pain syndrome in the Dutch general population. The researchers accessed patient data by means of the Integrated Primary Care Information project, which provided a large representative sample of the general population inclusive of all ages. They found an incidence of 26.2 per 100,000 person-years from a source population of 190,902 people. In those patients diagnosed by a specialist, three contemporaneous diagnostic criteria were applied, one of which was that of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). The authors demonstrated that there were marked differences in the proportions of cases fulfilling different criteria and thus highlighted problems with case diagnosis. When the 1994 IASP criteria were strictly applied, the incidence was found to be 16.8 per 100,000 person-years.