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Assessment of Common Pain Syndromes
Patients can experience acute or chronic pain from their cancer, diagnostic procedures, treatment, or preexisting conditions. Thus, patients should be carefully assessed to ensure that the cause of pain is established whenever possible and treated appropriately.
Some causes of cancer pain are relatively easy to diagnose and treat (e.g., pathologic fractures). However, clinicians treating patients with cancer should also be able to recognize readily the common pain syndromes that may cause intractable pain and that may signal disease recurrence in order to optimize therapy and minimize the morbidity of unrelieved pain. Furthermore, because many intractable pain problems involve necrologic structures (e.g., epidural spinal cord compression; metastatic bronchial and lumbosacral plexopathy), prompt recognition and treatment of these syndromes may also minimize necrologic impairment.131
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