Multidisciplinary Approach to Treating Chronic Pain in Patients with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome: Critically Appraised Topic
Abstract
The Ehlers-Danlos syndromes (EDS) are a group of 13 related connective tissue disorders with a combined prevalence of 1 in 5000 people, with the most common noted as hypermobile EDS (hEDS). The EDS genetic condition is thought to affect both males and females equally, although most symptomatic patients are female. EDS causes a myriad of symptoms, including skin hyperextensibility and fragility, easy bruising and bleeding, joint hypermobility, subluxation, dislocation, and chronic pain. Pain is one of the most common symptoms of EDS, leading to disability and decreased quality of life. Current guidelines for treating chronic pain in EDS are lacking. Clinicians focus on a conservative multidisciplinary approach in patients with EDS, which avoids surgical interventions and its accompanying risks of morbidity and mortality. The multidisciplinary approach includes physiotherapy, occupational therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and pharmacologic interventions to decrease pain. This review identifies literature examining the components of this conservative multidisciplinary approach and their effectiveness across the PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, Web of Science, and Trip databases, using the terms "Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome AND Pain Management" that was then subsequently evaluated. The evaluation of this current literature provides weak evidence to support the efficacy of the individual components of the conservative multidisciplinary approach. Lack of alternative approaches leaves…
Read the paper
Related studies
- The Matrisome: In Silico Definition and In Vivo Characterization by Proteomics of Normal and Tumor Extracellular Matrices
- The Escherichia coli MG1655 in silico metabolic genotype: Its definition, characteristics, and capabilities
- In silico pharmacology for drug discovery: methods for virtual ligand screening and profiling
- In silico prediction of splice-altering single nucleotide variants in the human genome
- In silico clinical trials: how computer simulation will transform the biomedical industry
- In silico optimization of a guava antimicrobial peptide enables combinatorial exploration for peptide design
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.