iPain Living Magazine — 19
mitment, service, and communication.
For more information,
please visit www.iasp-pain.org.
The new classification system for
chronic pain was based on extensive
research and data collected
over the last six years by an International
Association for the
Study of Pain (IASP) Task
Force, chaired by IASP Past
President and WHO Liaison,
Rolf-Detlef Treede, Dr. Med,
Heidelberg University, Mannheim,
Germany, and co-chair
Winfried Rief, Prof. Dr., Philipps
-Universität, Marburg, Germany.
As a result of this leadership by
the IASP, the new pain classification
system will transform patient
care and pain research
worldwide.
As a result of the Task Force’s
efforts, the ICD will, for the first
time, include diagnostic codes
for chronic pain along with codes
for the most common and clinically
relevant groups of chronic
pain conditions. “The inclusion
of the new classification system
for chronic pain in ICD-11 is an
important milestone for the pain
field. IASP leadership, on behalf
of our members, thanks the
member states of the WHO for
their leadership in improving patient
evaluation, treatment, and
research,” says IASP President
Lars Arendt-Nielsen, Dr. Med.,
PhD, Aalborg University, Denmark.
“I appreciate the leadership
of the IASP Task Force for
its tireless work on this project
generating evidenced-based recommendations
in strong collaboration
with IASP Special Interest
Groups and national chapters
globally.”
The ICD-11 will also for the first
time provide direct links to electronic
health records. “This enables
effortless behind-the-scenes
coding of clinical detail without
disrupting the clinical process,
and it will lead to better coding
quality and lower cost,” says Dr.
Robert Jakob of WHO. ICD-11
will improve patient care by facilitating
multimodal pain treatment
and by boosting efforts to
measure the quality and effectiveness
of care and new research
on the prevalence and impact of
chronic pain. “The Task Force
looks forward to working with
our 96 chapters around the world
and their governments to implement
ICD-11 with the new pain
codes as soon as possible,” says
Rolf-Detlef Treede, Task Force
Chair.
Chronic secondary pain is organized
into the following six categories:
Chronic cancer-related
pain is chronic pain, Chronic
postsurgical or post-traumatic
pain, Chronic neuropathic pain is
chronic pain caused by a lesion
or disease of the somatosensory
nervous system, Chronic secondary
headache or orofacial
pain contains the chronic forms
of symptomatic headaches (those
termed primary headaches in the
ICHD-3 are part of chronic primary
pain) and follows closely
the ICHD-3 classification,
Chronic secondary visceral
pain is chronic pain, and Chronic
secondary musculoskeletal pain.
Congratulations to IASP and
WHO for including chronic pain
in the ICD-11 Diagnostic Codes,
which go into effect in 2022.
This new code may permit more
accurate epidemiological analysis
of conditions characterized by
musculoskeletal pain from health
registers. We at International
Pain Foundation and on behalf of
the chronic pain community are
excited that this step is taken and
will improve the access to proper
and timely treatment chronic pain
patients deserve.
/www.iasp-pain.org