Neuropathic Pain Symptom Inventory (NPSI) Tool

The Neuropathic Pain Symptom Inventory (NPSI) is a special questionnaire that helps doctors understand different types of pain caused by problems in the nervous system (like nerves in your body). There are many kinds of nerve pain, and the NPSI helps figure out what type of pain someone is feeling so doctors can choose the best way to treat it.

If you are feeling pain, it could be from injury or disease in your nerves. This pain can happen in different ways. Sometimes you might feel pain even when nothing is touching you (this is called spontaneous pain). Other times, your pain might get worse when something touches your skin, like brushing against it, pressing on it, or feeling something cold. You might feel one kind of pain or many at the same time. The NPSI helps your doctor know exactly what you are feeling so they can treat it better.

The NPSI has 10 questions (plus two extra ones) that ask about different kinds of nerve pain, like:

• How strong your spontaneous pain is.
• How bad your painful attacks are.
• How much pain you feel when something touches you.
• How strong any weird sensations are.

Each question is rated on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means no pain at all and 10 means the worst pain you can imagine. Your answers are added up to give a total pain score, and each part can be looked at on its own to understand different types of pain.

Doctors use this tool to measure how much pain you’ve had in the past 24 hours and to see if different treatments are helping. It’s also used for people with certain bone conditions like Fibrous Dysplasia, Achondroplasia, or Osteogenesis Imperfecta, and is usually filled out once a year or more, depending on what your doctor thinks.

You can read more about this tool here Development and validation of the Neuropathic Pain Symptom Inventory – PubMed (nih.gov) and here Neuropathic Pain Symptom Inventory (NPSI) | PainScale

If you don’t know what your results mean – please, contact your doctor for help.