Real time evaluation of cramps

Not all cramps are the same. Worse yet: they don’t always respond to medication. Our new paper characterizing menstrual cramps and their response to naproxen in real-time is out! https://doi.org/10.1111/jog.14663

Spontaneous pain is possibly the most important component in pain; however, it has been rarely captured in human research continuously over time. To address this limitation, we developed and investigated the utility of a novel assessment tool for continuous measurement of pain duration, frequency and amplitude in women with menstrual pain. Our results suggest that this method provides pain data that is capable of characterizing mechanisms of chronic pain as well as measuring therapeutic efficacy. Further extension of these methods could be used for other pain conditions with dynamic components for deeper phenotyping and assessing novel treatments.