Efficacy of the PainVision apparatus for assessment of axial neck pain after cervical laminoplasty: a prospective study

Axial neck pain is one of the complications of posterior cervical surgeries such as laminoplasty. This study aimed to investigate the efficiency of the PainVision apparatus for axial neck pain assessment by comparing it with other methods. This prospective study included 118 patients (90 men and 28 women; average age: 66.9 (32-86) years) with cervical myelopathy who underwent open-door laminoplasty at our medical center between April 2009 and August 2019. Pain degree (PD) measured by PainVision, visual analog scale (VAS), and bodily pain (BP), a subitem of the MOS 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey (SF36), were used to evaluate axial neck pain, which was investigated preoperatively and at 3, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months postoperatively. Comparison of the scores at each evaluation time point found significant improvement between the pre- and post-operative values for all assessment methods. Further, on comparing the amounts of change between pre- and post-operative scores in each pain assessment method, we found significant differences in PD and VAS but not in BP. We also found significant positive correlations between PD and VAS at each time point (all p