Overview
Chronic pain is pain that persists or recurs for an extended period, typically defined as longer than three months, often continuing beyond the normal time expected for tissue healing. Unlike acute pain, which serves as a protective warning signal, chronic pain can persist as a condition in its own right and is associated with changes in the nervous system involving altered synaptic and neuronal plasticity and central sensitization. It can profoundly affect physical function, mental health, and emotional well-being and frequently coexists with depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbance. Common causes include arthritis, nerve damage, back injury, fibromyalgia, post-surgical pain, and cancer. Management is typically multimodal, combining pharmacological treatments, physical therapy, psychological approaches, and interventional or neuromodulatory techniques. Reflecting its focus, this pain-management journal publishes research across multiple dimensions of chronic pain, including music-induced analgesia through endogenous opioid production, auricular vagus nerve stimulation and pain-related cytokine levels, the psychosomatic interface of pain, persistent pain after lung transplantation, epigenetic regulation of BDNF gene expression in chronic pain, pain perception and hippocampal plasticity in animal models, high-dose capsaicin patch treatment for low back pain, novel analgesic and anti-inflammatory drug derivatives, and clinical decision-support systems integrating analgesic dosing with pain-trend analysis.
Research published in this journal
12 peer-reviewed articles, ranked by relevance. Each links to its DOI.
How this research is being cited
The 12 articles above have been cited 20 times in the scholarly literature. Citation data via OpenAlex and Crossref, updated Jun 2026.
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2026 · Journal of Surgical Research
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2026 · Psychiatry Neurology and Medical Psychology
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2026 · Neurology International
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2025 · Expert Review of Medical Devices
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2025 · Expert Review of Medical Devices
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2024 · Clinical Transplantation
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M. Dalvindt et al. · 2024 · Clinical Transplantation
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2023 · International journal of psychological research
A sample of recent works citing this journal's research on Chronic Pain, linking to each citing work.