The article entitled mHealth Intervention for Improving Pain, Quality of Life, and Functional Disability in Patients with Chronic Pain: Systematic Review by the Pain Observatory team has recently been published in the international journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth. This would be the second thesis article of our colleague Marta Moreno.
It is a systematic review that evaluates the impact of mHealth on the biopsychosocial approach to chronic pain (CP), specifically on pain intensity, quality of life and functional disability. To this end, a search of studies published up to March 2022 was conducted in Pubmed, Web of Science, Scopus and Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) databases, from which 22 articles were included.
Several CD conditions included in the latest version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD 11th) and a total of 23 mHealth systems were identified to carry out various strategies, among which pain and symptom monitoring and home exercise programs were the most commonly used.
The results of the articles showed beneficial effects of the use of mHealth systems in reducing pain intensity in subjects with chronic neck pain (CLBP), fibromyalgia, bladder pain syndrome and osteoarthritis (OA); in decreasing functional disability in subjects with MCI, CLBP, chronic musculoskeletal pain and OA; as well as in increasing quality of life in subjects with chronic low back pain (CLBP), CLBP, irritable bowel syndrome and OA.
Therefore, mHealth seems to be an alternative to improve pain-related outcomes and quality of life, and could be part of multimodal strategies for self-management of CD. However, high-quality studies are needed to merge the scientific evidence and recommendations for the use of mHealth systems for CD management.
You can read the full article by clicking on the following link: https://doi.org/10.2196/40844
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