In Gut, Olesen et al present the first comprehensive multicentre cross-sectional study of pain in prospectively enrolled chronic pancreatitis (CP) patients.1 It is demonstrated that pain-related factors are often overlapping in these patients and have a cumulative detrimental effect on patient-reported outcomes. One might argue that the results of this study are lacking novelty, but there are several reasons why such studies are urgently warranted.

Pain, may it be acute, recurring or chronic, is one of the cardinal symptoms of CP and impacts patients’ well-being significantly.2 Thus far, several efforts have been conducted to improve the treatment of painful CP, with variable outcome. At first it is interesting to note, that the methodology to quantify pain for most of the published efforts was not validated in CP patients before and as such results obtained in these studies might not truly reflect the patients’ situation.3 Second, the approaches to understand pain patterns seem to need evaluation of …