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Methods.
Physical therapy interventions were given once a week for five consecutive weeks in a 30 minutes time frame. The different interventions use during this study were performed by a physical therapist and a clinical psychologist. These interventions were cognitive-affective, central sensitization, peripheral sensitization, nociceptive and sympathetically maintained pain. Each one of them were aim to educate the patient while performing more physical interventions. …show more content…
The study is the first of its kind, conducted on patients with cancer pain where the treatment was based on the identified predominant mechanism of pain. While mechanisms were found to play an important role not only in therapeutic responses but also in pathogenesis of pain per se, the notable changes in outcome measures of pain and quality of life measured using subscales of Brief pain inventory-Cancer pain (BPI-CP) and European organization for research and treatment in cancer-quality of life questionnaire (EORTC-QLQ-C30) were much beyond the substantial effective sizes for both the measures. This change was associated with 100% statistical power, which adds to the external validity of this study's findings. There were thus clinically significant improvements together with the statistical significance. The choice of these two outcome measures would have determined the accuracy of the observed change since they were chosen based on earlier reports of their established measurement properties and evidence-based recommendations on their use. [23],[24] This study findings are based on a small sample size and hence caution is warranted prior to extrapolation of its findings into patient populations with cancer