Pain after Stroke

What is it about?

A stroke is a very serious condition where not enough blood can get to part of your brain. It needs to be treated in hospital as soon as possible. Common symptoms of a stroke include your face dropping on one side, not being able to lift your arms, and slurred speech. Across the world, one in four people over age 25 will have a stroke in their lifetime, but they are more common in older people. While most people recover a lot in the days and weeks after having a stroke, it can take years to fully recover. For some people, long-term care is needed so that they can be independent. Pain after having a stroke is often not managed well enough in medical care. We wanted to help work out when best to start patient care for pain after strokes by looking at how common pain was, how it changed over time, and whether it was more common in some people than others. In this study, we looked at studies recorded in the Virtual International Stroke Trials Archive (VISTA) who recorded pain. Pain scores were available in 10 studies in VISTA, totalling 10,002 people with stroke. Most people in the studies were aged between 60 and 80. Across the studies, between 3 and 10% of people reported extreme pain at some point. Pain was most common in people with less independence. This is somewhat a ‘vicious cycle’, where being less able to move increases your pain, but your pain also makes you less able to move. In the future, we need to work out how we can best encourage gentle movement to limit pain getting worse.

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