This week’s episode highlights a 2025 perspective article published in Frontiers in Pain Research titled, “Outcome assessment in veterinary pain studies: a pain in animals workshop (PAW) perspective.” While not a clinical trial, the paper offers an important look at how veterinary medicine measures pain, why that remains difficult, and what needs to improve to advance both patient care and therapeutic development.
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Why This Matters
Pain reduction is one of the central goals of regenerative medicine. But before any therapy can be proven effective, pain has to be measured in a meaningful and repeatable way.
That is especially challenging in veterinary medicine. Animals cannot self-report pain, and chronic pain often presents differently from one patient to the next. Changes in mobility, posture, appetite, activity, and behavior may all reflect discomfort, but none alone provides a perfect measurement tool. The article argues that improving pain assessment is essential not only for clinical care, but also for building better studies and developing more effective therapeutics.
Study Overview
- Type: Perspective article
- Journal: Frontiers in Pain Research
- Published: April 10, 2025
- Focus: How pain is assessed in veterinary studies, especially chronic pain
- Main themes: owner assessment, gait analysis, activity monitoring, biomarkers, and translational pain research
Findings From the Literature
- Pain assessment in dogs has evolved, even if the core tools look familiar
The paper notes that when Rimadyl was approved in 1996 for osteoarthritis pain in dogs, effectiveness was evaluated using three main approaches: veterinarian assessment, owner assessment, and gait analysis. Nearly 30 years later, those same categories still anchor chronic pain assessment in dogs.
That may sound like little has changed, but the authors make the opposite point. Progress has come through improving validation, refining how these tools are used, and understanding which outcome measures are most appropriate for different study goals.
- Owner assessments are more important than they were once believed to be
One of the article’s biggest themes is the growing acceptance of owner-completed pain assessments in chronic pain research.
Historically, there were several objections. Pain was considered too subjective to measure. Animals could not speak for themselves. And owners were not always seen as trained observers. But the field has moved toward recognizing that chronic pain is often best observed at home, where owners see the animal’s normal behavior patterns over time.
That is especially relevant in conditions like osteoarthritis, cancer-associated pain, and oral pain, where the most meaningful changes may not be obvious in the clinic environment.
- There is no single “best” pain measurement tool
A key takeaway from the paper is that pain assessment should not be framed as a competition between subjective and objective tools.
The authors discuss the long-running debate around owner questionnaires versus gait analysis and argue that the better question is: what outcome measure makes the most sense for the study?
For example, gait analysis remains the gold standard for measuring lameness. But if the goal is to understand how pain affects daily life and function at home, an owner-completed tool may be more appropriate. The same logic applies when comparing instruments like the Canine Brief Pain Inventory (CBPI) and Liverpool Osteoarthritis in Dogs (LOAD), which assess related but different aspects of the patient experience.
- Activity monitors and biomarkers may help strengthen future studies
The paper also highlights areas that could play a bigger role in the future, including activity monitoring and pain biomarkers.
Activity monitors may help capture clinically relevant changes in movement, rest, and sleep, particularly when paired with owner assessments. The authors also describe biomarkers as a major area of interest, noting that a simple objective test for pain would be a major advance for both veterinary and human medicine.
These tools are not yet complete replacements for current approaches, but they may become valuable additions as the field matures.
- Better pain measurement is directly tied to better therapeutic development
One of the most important sections of the article focuses on translational research.
The authors point out that chronic pain remains a major public health issue, yet the development of novel pain therapeutics has been limited. They argue that one reason for this is the lack of improved, validated, and clinically relevant ways to measure pain in preclinical and translational research.
The paper calls attention to the limitations of induced disease models and suggests that spontaneous disease models in non-rodent animals may offer a more clinically relevant path forward. But for those models to be useful, the profession still needs reliable and meaningful pain outcome measures.
Final Thoughts
This perspective serves as a reminder that advancing pain therapeutics depends on more than identifying promising treatments. It also depends on having the right tools to evaluate whether those treatments are truly helping patients.
For veterinary medicine, that means continuing to refine how pain is measured across settings, conditions, and species. And for regenerative medicine, it reinforces a simple truth: the better pain is measured, the better therapies can be studied, validated, and applied in practice.
For more discussion and insights, listen to this episode of Sit. Stay. Learn.
Have a paper you’d like covered on a future episode? Send article suggestions to adrienne@ardentanimalhealth.com
