This week’s EBN Twitter Chat on Weds 19^th April at 8-9pm UK time will focus on pain during pregnancy, how important and difficult is to treat pain during pregnancy and breast feeding.

The Twitter Chat will be hosted by Dr Massimo Allegri, Assistant Professor in Anesthesia Intensive Care and Pain Medicine at the University of Parma (Italy),@allegri_massimo. Participating in the Twitter chat requires a Twitter account; if you do not already have one you can create an account at www.twitter.com. Once you have an account contributing is straightforward, You can follow the discussion by searching links to #ebnjc, or contribute by creating and sending a tweet (tweets are text messages limited to 140 characters) to @EBNursingBMJ and add #ebnjc (the EBN chat hash tag) at the end of your tweet, this allows everyone taking part to view your tweets.

The Pain Department of University Hospital of Parma is one of the biggest pain clinic in Italy and it is the most important research centre about acute ad chronic pain in Italy and one of the most important in Europe.

Furthermore, next year a new PhD Position in Pain will be settled up together with Alborg University and Prof Lars Arendt Nielsen about chronic pain and central sensitization. Furthermore, University of Parma organizes one of the most important translational pain meeting in the world: SIMPAR (www.simpar-pain.com).

Pain affects 20% of adult population worsening not only quality of life, but also outcome of patients who refer it. Unfortunately, pain continues to being undertreated and under-recognized. Chronic pain is not just a symptom but it is a real disease that needs an accurate diagnosis and appropriate therapy against the pain generator pathophysiology.

This problem is even more important during pregnancy and breastfeeding. The fear to give drugs that can hurt foetus/neonate can drive the physician to a “wait and see” approach that cannot solve the problem to the mother. Furthermore, during pregnancy there are several physiological changes that can worsen previous pain or generate new one. Finally, all the drugs are obviously off label and it is difficult to know exactly their real toxicity.

On Wednesday 19^th April during the twitter chat we will continue the conversation to consider how to drive the therapy for patients during pregnancy and breastfeeding. We will discuss all together which multidisciplinary approach could be useful and how important is to diagnose the right pathophysiological mechanism that triggers the acute or chronic pain:

• Which are the classifications of the drugs that could drive clinicians to use the drugs to alleviate pain?
• When is more harmful to use some specific drugs?
• Which concerns do we have to consider when we give a drug to a breastfeeding mother?
• How to perform the right pathophysiological diagnosis?
• Do we have to stop some drugs if the women would like to become pregnant

Please join us to discuss this important medical, nursing and public health challenge.

References

1 Coluzzi F, Valensise H, Sacco M, Allegri M Chronic pain management in pregnancy and lactation. Minerva Anestesiol. 2014 Feb;80(2):211-24.

2  Narayan B, Nelson-Piercy C. Medical problems in pregnancy. Clin Med (Lond). 2016 Dec;16(Suppl 6):s110-s116.

3 Tepper D. Pregnancy and lactation–migraine management. Headache. 2015 Apr;55(4):607-8.