Turning Patients' Open-Ended Narratives of Chronic Pain Into Quantitative Measures: Natural Language Processing Study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Subjective report of pain remains the gold standard for assessing symptoms in patients with chronic pain and their response to analgesics. This subjectivity underscores the importance of understanding patients' personal narratives, as they offer an accurate representation of the illness experience.

Objective

In this pilot study involving 20 patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP), we applied emerging tools from natural language processing (NLP) to derive quantitative measures that captured patients' pain narratives.

Methods

Patients' narratives were collected during recorded semistructured interviews in which they spoke about their lives in general and their experiences with CLBP. Given that NLP is a novel approach in this field, our goal was to demonstr

SUBMITTER: Norel R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12690277 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature