Complex regional pain syndrome – False hopes and miscommunications

Publication date: Available online 11 January 2019Source: Autoimmunity ReviewsAuthor(s): Christopher Chang, Patrick McDonnell, M. Eric GershwinAbstractComplex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) has been considered to be an autoimmune disease and there have been clinical trials with intravenous immunoglobulin. Often the etiology of the so-called CRPS diagnosis cannot be discerned and there are no validated instruments that provide functional metrics. The term complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), coined in 1994 to describe patients in whom the pain is out of proportion to the injury, was actually a diagnosis proposed during the American Civil War, but was originally known as causalgia. Physicians have long observed similar sensitivity and inflammatory symptoms following periods of immobilization and disuse, which generally resolve within a few months of remobilization. Following the original description, persistent disproportionate pain would come to be known under many other names until researchers theorized that it was related to dysfunction in the sympathetic nervous system, after which it acquired the moniker, Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (“RSD”). In the latter quarter of the twentieth century, after researchers failed to prove the connection between the pain and the sympathetic nervous system, a small cadre of physicians–without rigorous science—invented CRPS. This new descriptor, CRPS, has become not only a diagnosis without objective data but with proposed criteria ...

Source: Autoimmunity Reviews - January 12, 2019 Category: Allergy & Immunology Source Type: research