The personal, social and economic burden of chronic pain is enormous. Yet patients with chronic pain, clinicians and the public are often poorly served by an evidence base that contains multiple structural weaknesses which reduce confidence in treatment practice. Weaknesses in clinical research evidence include incomplete research governance, inadequate stakeholder engagement, poor methodological rigour, questionable research practices and incomplete reporting, a lack of data accessibility and transparency, and a failure to communicate findings with appropriate balance. These issues impact pre-clinical research, clinical trials, systematic reviews and impact on the development of clinical guidance and practice update. Research misconduct presents a further critical risk. Combined, these weaknesses serve to increase uncertainty in this highly challenging area of study and practice, drive the provision of low value care, increase costs and impede the discovery of more effective interventions. 

 

The ENhancing TRUSTworthiness in Pain Evidence (ENTRUST-PE) network project brings together international network from the pain research community. It is truly interdisciplinary with members from medicine, psychology, physical rehabilitation, pharmacology, patient advocacy, statistics and methodology. The central objective of our proposed network is to develop ENTRUST-PE, a novel integrated framework for enhancing and facilitating the trustworthiness of evidence for chronic pain. This will involve identifying and synthesising a range of available resources into a common framework that supports researchers, editors and publishers to minimise threats to the trustworthiness of pain research.

 

The project commenced in September 2023 and will complete and report at the end of August 2024. This project is funded by the European Research Area Networks (ERA-NET) Neuron CoFund2 Consortium.