Perioperative management may lead to less pain after breast cancer surgery

Kristin L. Schreiber, MD, PhD, assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and senior author of the report, believes their new study advances the understanding of this complex issue. “While we may not be the first people to show these associations,... bringing it forward in a prospectively measured way is relatively new. I think it could be a new concept for many surgeons who have traditionally focused on what they’ve done surgically, and how that impacts pain afterwards, rather than considering the patient’s individual characteristics that might make them more susceptible to developing chronic pain.” Dr. Schreiber, a neuroscientist in the department of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, says one question she and her colleagues wanted to address is whether preoperative depression and anxiety are risk factors for developing chronic pain (defined in this study as a pain severity of at least 4 on a scale of 0 to 10 at 6 months). “Knowing this could allow these psychosocial traits to be used as markers to help predict who would have higher risk of long-term pain, and possibly treat them differently in the perioperative period.”