Sensory Processing Patterns in People With Complex Regional Pain Syndrome.

Everyone volunteered from one patient association's mailing list and the response rate was low, so the 62 people who answered may not represent people with CRPS more generally. Nobody checked the diagnosis. Participants said they had CRPS and were not assessed against the standard clinical criteria, so some may not have had it. Only people with CRPS in an arm or hand were included, and 90.3% of participants were women and 93.6% were White or White plus another race, so the results say little about men, other ethnic groups, or people with CRPS in a leg. Everyone was surveyed once, so the study cannot say whether these sensory patterns were present before the injury or came with the CRPS, or whether they change over time. The sensory profile questionnaire used has not been validated in people with CRPS. The analysis did not take account of how long people had had CRPS, and the paper says doing so could have strengthened it. The power calculation was done after the data were collected, which the authors acknowledge increases the risk of a false positive result.

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship or publication of the article. No funding source is stated in the text of the article provided.

Do not read this as showing that sensory processing problems cause CRPS, or that changing a client's sensory environment will treat it. It was one online survey of 62 self-selected volunteers, with no clinical check of their diagnosis and no treatment or follow-up, so it describes what these people reported rather than what came first or what helps. The figures of 2.68 and 8.21 times higher risk that appear in the paper come from a different study the authors cite, not from this one.