When you get to the differences between gender, they are also significant. With exactly the same trending as with GBS/CIDP, with females suffering from considerably more pain than males! Maybe men are hardier after all?
I am aware of the issues with self diagnosis of how each person regards a level of pain/discomfort. My view is that this is usually based on a previous reference point, thus if you have had severe pain in the past, you can gauge what you have for GBS/CIDP against that and it doesn't seem so bad. This is certainly the case for me, as I have had a severely broken leg (when I was 9) and can remember the initial pain from that as being excruciating, so when comparing my nerve pains today with that I would rate this at around 6 or 7 (as simply I can put up with it, whereas before I could not).
If I look at the answer to "When do you have pain?":
This to me looks curious and worthy of more inspection, as 45% of people who get nerve pain get it all the time, yet between the other categories it is fairly similar, though evening/night have higher numbers. I would have expected to see patterns around wither lots of activity or none (e.g. night) - which in my case is when I get the vast majority of my issues (especially at 2:00 in the morning). Maybe we are less active in both the evening and night....
The graph above tries to compare differences between GBS & CIDP. Clearly, though these is an increase in the numbers with nerve pain between GBS & CIDP, the relative numbers are remarkably similar. This would seem to indicate is is consistent across the two conditions, which I find surprising.
Finally, for now, doing the same comparison between genders has the same differences as between the diseases. The only minor difference is in random pain. This is really surprising and must be a coincidence, unless all the males who filled in the survey have GBS & all the females CIDP! (which they do not).
Next time I will review where the nerve pain is....
