Abstract
Pain in cancer is a common and burdensome symptom with different causes but in a significant number of cases it is undiagnosed and undertreated because of lack of skills for its assessment. Pain has significant negative impact on the patient and, therefore, it needs to be managed urgently and appropriately. In resource-limited settings, there are several barriers and challenges to pain management but even in these circumstances pain can be well managed with planned and innovative use of resources and if the World Health Organization public health system approach is used to ensure opioid availability.
Highlights
Pain in cancer patients is one of the most feared and burdensome symptoms [1] and is often undertreated [2]
In Africa, the prevalence of cancer pain ranges from 35.7% to 87.5% with the prevalence being more than 70% in most of the studies [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
In many resource-limited settings, there are few oncologists and palliative care specialists and many cancer patients may be treated by Health Professionals without the skills of pain assessment because there was no provision for palliative care in their training
Summary
Pain in cancer patients is one of the most feared and burdensome symptoms [1] and is often undertreated [2]. There is limited published data from resource-limited settings on the causes of pain in cancer patients; most data is limited to prevalence of pain in these patients and in most cases it is assumed that pain is due to the tumor [3,4,5,6,7,8,9, 12, 13] This is probably because in resource-limited countries there are limited treatment options for most cancers, and patients present late with advanced malignancy, and, it is likely that more of the pain will be due to the tumor and less due to treatment as compared to developed countries. A good pain assessment is important to identify the cause and be able to manage it effectively
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