Pain Measurement in Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Diseases: Where To Go from Here? Report from a Special Interest Group at OMERACT 2018

Objective.Establishing a research agenda on standardizing pain measurement in clinical trials in rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMD).Methods.Discussion during a meeting at the Outcome Measures in Rheumatology (OMERACT) 2018, prepared by a systematic review of existing core outcome sets and a patient online survey.Results.Several key questions were debated: Is pain a symptom or a disease? Are pain core (sub)domains consistent across RMD? How to account for pain mechanistic descriptors (e.g., central sensitization) in pain measurement?Conclusion.Characterizing and assessing the spectrum of pain experience across RMD in a standardized fashion is the objective of the OMERACT Pain Working Group.