A Latin American consensus meeting on the essentials of mixed pain.

OBJECTIVES: The term "mixed pain" has been established when a mixture of different pain components (e.g. nociceptive, neuropathic, and nociplastic) are present. It has gained more and more acceptance amongst pain experts worldwide, but many questions around the concept of mixed pain are still unsolved. The sensation of pain is very personal. Cultural, social, personal experiences, idiomatic, and taxonomic differences should be taken into account during pain assessment. Therefore, a Latin American consensus committee was formed to further elaborate the essentials of mixed pain, focusing on the specific characteristics of the Latin American population. METHODS: The current approach was based on a systematic literature search and review carried out in Medline. Eight topics about the definition, diagnosis, and treatment of mixed pain were discussed and voted for by a Latin American consensus committee and recommendations were expressed. RESULTS: At the end of the meeting a total of 14 voting sheets were collected. The full consensus was obtained for 21 of 25 recommendations (15 strong agreement and 6 unanimous agreement) formulated for the above described 8 topics (7 of the 8 topics had for all questions at least a strong agreement - 1 topic had no agreement for all 4 questions). CONCLUSION: In a subject as complex as mixed pain, a consensus has been reached among Latin American specialists on points related to the definition and essence of this pain, its diagnosis and treatment. Recommendations for diagnosis and treatment of mixed pain in Latin America were raised.

Current understanding of the mixed pain concept: a brief narrative review.

Despite having been referenced in the literature for over a decade, the term "mixed pain" has never been formally defined. The strict binary classification of pain as being either purely neuropathic or nociceptive once left a good proportion of patients unclassified; even the recent adoption of "nociplastic pain" in the IASP Terminology leaves out patients who present clinically with a substantial overlap of nociceptive and neuropathic symptoms. For these patients, the term "mixed pain" is increasingly recognized and accepted by clinicians. Thus, an independent group of international multidisciplinary clinicians convened a series of informal discussions to consolidate knowledge and articulate all that is known (or, more accurately, thought to be known) and all that is not known about mixed pain. To inform the group's discussions, a Medline search for the Medical Subject Heading "mixed pain" was performed via PubMed. The search strategy encompassed clinical trial articles and reviews from January 1990 to the present. Clinically relevant articles were selected and reviewed. This paper summarizes the group's consensus on several key aspects of the mixed pain concept, to serve as a foundation for future attempts at generating a mechanistic and/or clinical definition of mixed pain. A definition would have important implications for the development of recommendations or guidelines for diagnosis and treatment of mixed pain.