THE EVALUATION OF CORRELATION BETWEEN PAIN GRADES AND RE-PRESENTATION RATES OF THE PATIENTS IN EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT EMEL ERKUS SIRKECI 1 , HAKAN TOPACOGLU 1 , OZGUR DIKME 1 , OZLEM DIKME 2 , MUSTAFA ORFI ERDEDE 1 , EMINE OZYUVACI 3 , SILA SADILLIOGLU 1 1 Emergency Physician, Emergency Department of Istanbul Education and Research Hospital, Istanbul - 2 Emergency Physician, Emergency Department of Haseki Education and Research Hospital, Istanbul - 3 Anaesthesiologist, Istanbul Education and Research Hospital, Istanbul Introduction Pain as a universal phenomenon is defined as an “unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) (1) . Pain emerges due to many distinct causes throughout lifetime and its expression by an indi- vidual is influenced by factors including age, gen- der, underlying disability and social and cultural characteristics related to pain behavior (2) . Pain has sensory, emotional, behavioral and cognitive com- ponents (3) . Therefore, pain complaints also vary by age and gender (4, 5) . As it is perceived differently in each age and gender, it is also influenced by the sociocultural level of the society (6, 7) . A study shows that racial characteristics also have an effect on perception of pain (8) . Thus, patients should be evaluated individu- ally and the severity of pain should be graded. Considered as a biological reaction associated with tissue damage, pain is also said to have aspects related to genetic, emotional and cultural character- istics, beliefs and individual factors and therefore, although it occurs due to similar physiological causes, pain experience and severity exhibit indi- vidual differences (9, 10) . Pain frequency is higher in elderly, who have more experience of pain com- pared to other age groups, in women and in people Acta Medica Mediterranea, 2013, 29: 561 ABSTRACT Introduction: Pain complaint comprises the majority of the patient presentations to the emergency department. Temporary symptomatic treatment is applied to the patients presenting to the emergency department for pain complaint. The aim of this study is to determine some of the factors that affect the re-presentation of patients to the emergency department who presented previously for pain complaint. Material and method: 1021 adult patients who presented to the emergency department for pain complaint were included in the study. Their admission and discharge pain grades were assessed by VAS. The factors affecting the correlation between pain grades and re-presentations were analyzed. Results: Average admission VAS score of the study patients was 79.2±13.5 mm (scale 20-100) and their average discharge VAS score was 31± 19.8 mm (scale 0-100). We observed that age, gender, hour of presentation, pain duration and analgesic usage of patients did not affect their re-presentations. Rate of re-presentation to the emergency department was high for patients suffering from chronic diseases and who present for pain complaint, patients presenting for chest pain and patients to whom drug treatment was applied. We found out that while admission pain grades have no effect on re-presentation, re-presentation rate was high for patients who had high discharge pain grades. Conclusion: Decreasing the pain grade of the patients who present to the emergency department for pain complaints as far as possible will decrease their re-presentation rates. Therefore, it is important to effectively stop the pain even when the emergency department is busy. Key words: Emergency department, pain, re-presentation. Received June 25, 2013; Accepted July 19, 2013