What decline in pain intensity is meaningful to patients with acute pain?

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Abstract
Duction. Upon arrival to the postanesthesia care unit, postsurgical patients rated their baseline pain intensity on both a 0–10 NRS and on a 4-point verbal scale. Patients whose NRS was higher than 4/10 received intravenous opioids until their pain intensity declined to 4/10 or lower. During opioid titration, patients were asked every 10 min to rate pain intensity on a NRS and to indicate the degree of pain improvement on a 5-point Likert scale from ‘no improvement’ to ‘complete pain relief’. Seven hundred adult patients were enrolled. For patients with moderate pain, a decrease of 1.3 units (20% reduction) corresponded to ‘minimal’ improvement, a decrease of 2.4 (35% reduction) to ‘much’ improvement, a decrease of 3.5 units (45% reduction) corresponded to ‘very much’ improvement. For patients with severe pain, the decrease in NRS pain score and the percentage of pain relief had to be larger to obtain similar degrees of pain relief. The change in pain intensity that is meaningful to patients increases as the severity of their baseline pain increases. The present findings are applicable in the clinical setting and research arena to assess treatment efficacy....