Introduction:

Pain is a complex interaction of systems, with a process that integrates sensory, cognitive and/or emotional information that comes from real or potential threats. It has been observed a connection in the chronic pain with other somatic and psychological symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, lack of sleep, fatigue and reduction of cognitive capacity. It has been demonstrated that proinflammatory cytokines and associated symptoms influence in the probability of suffering chronic pain. The objective is to analyze the levels of the inflammatory mediators in diseases with chronic pain and with related disorders, so that we can better understand long-term pain.

Material and methods:

To make this dissertation, a review of the scientific literature was carried out by a systematized search in the Pubmed, CINHAL, Medline, Scopus and Web of Science databases, in January 2020. The inclusion criteria were: to be documents written in English or Spanish and published in the last 5 years. The exclusion criteria were: review studies, and articles repeated in other databases or that addressed other topics.

Results:

13 articles were selected after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria. All publications were observational studies. Proinflammatory cytokine values were compared in patients with chronic pain, taking into account insomnia, pain tolerance, catastrophism, gender and body mass index.

Conclusion:

Chronic pain is conditioned by multiple factors, so its physiopathology must be known. In this way, the measurement of the C-reactive protein and the proinflammatory cytokines could mean an advance in the evaluation and monitoring of the patient with chronic pain.

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