Pain measurement in rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases: where to go from here? Report from a Special Interest Group at OMERACT 2018

Objective Establishing a research agenda on standardizing pain measurement in clinical trials in rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs). Methods Discussion during a meeting at OMERACT 2018, prepared by a systematic review of existing core outcome sets and a patient online survey. Results Several key questions were debated: is pain a symptom or a disease? are pain core (sub)domains consistent across RMDs? how to account for pain mechanistic descriptors (e.g. central sensitization) in pain measurement? Conclusion Characterizing and assessing the spectrum of pain experience across RMDs in a standardized fashion is the future objective of the OMERACT pain working group.