PAIN ASSESSMENT MEASURES: Visual Analog Scale (VAS)

This is an old scale, which has never caught on in dentistry. Words are not assigned to the VAS, but it goes by numbers and is quantitative. “Mild, moderate, severe” are not accurate terms. The choice of a drug should depend more on a quantitative scale, such as the VAS. In this system, the clinician can chart the amount of pain that a person is in and it can be normalized to help with clinical studies. Mean VAS scores may be plotted before, during and after analgesic therapy, vs variables such as time post medication (or placebo), or vs dose of drug (as seen in the handout). So the VAS can help us to determine that CP99 is not in clinical use, because it is not much better at analgesia than a placebo.

There are other scales using the same idea, for instance an increasing degree of sad faces can help a child to tell you how much pain he or she is in; also there are color gradation scales for people who understand that better.

Category: Pharmacology Notes