Recognizing Pain Intensity in Alzheimer's Disease: Autonomic Nervous System Variations and Facial Emotion

The most common form of dementia is Alzheimer's disease, with 900,000 people affected in France in 2015 and a forecast of 1.3 million in 2020. As a consequence of their advanced age, dementia patients often suffer from pain, mainly musculoskeletal or neuropathic pain. However, the exact prevalence of pain in dementia is underestimated. Indeed, several studies indicate that people suffering from dementia report less pain. This phenomenon is all the more true as the stage of dementia is advanced. In addition, people with dementia receive less pain medication than people without cognitive impairment in similarly painful conditions. Hetero-evaluation alone also seems insufficient, with the result that pain is under-treated compared to patients without cognitive impairment. Better pain screening is a major challenge and self-assessment tools should be favoured as a first line of treatment, even for patients with cognitive impairment. suffering from dementia.

The investigators propose in this work to evaluate the variation of vegetative parameters that accompany a painful stimulus. These variations can be recorded at the cardiac, vascular, pupillary or skin conductance level.