Recognising pain as a component of symptom clusters: A means of informing the nursing management of symptoms and side-effects

This paper argues that pain should not be regarded as a symptom in isolation but as a component of symptom clusters. Recent research on symptom clusters that involve pain is overviewed, together with data from a single case study. These sources of evidence suggest that pain is commonly associated with other symptoms, especially fatigue, and is an important but not necessarily dominant component of clusters of three or more symptoms. Much more research into the interactions between symptoms, their synergistic effects and their impact on the patient's decisions about symptom management is needed. Nurse researchers are ideally placed to play a leading role in this research agenda, given the focus of nursing practice on symptom and side-effect management.