It’s not surprising that people living with chronic pain often have high levels of emotional distress. The question that Stanford researcher Drew Sturgeon, MD, a postdoctoral pain psychology fellow in the Stanford Pain Management Center, recently aimed to determine was why. Is a patient's depression or anger caused by his or her inability to do physical things or is it perhaps because pain can limit social relationships?
"What I hear from patients is that it’s not just that it hurts, but that the pain takes you away from things that matter to you - the things that are meaningful to you," Sturgeon recently said.
To explore this further, Sturgeon and colleagues analyzed data from 675 patients who came into the Stanford pain clinic and filled out data sets for the national open source Collaborative Health Outcomes Information Registry, referred to as CHOIR. CHOIR is a registry that originated at the Stanford pain center to help improve the collection and reporting of data on pain.
The researchers examined both physical functioning and social satisfaction reported by chronic pain patients, since both have been shown to play a role in causing anger and depression. Their results — published online recently in the journal Pain — show that the effects of chronic pain on a patient’s social relationships can be a key trigger of depression and anger, even more so than the limits that pain can place on physical activity.
"My suspicion was that there was going to be a stronger frustration when [the pain] affects social relations," Sturgeon told me. "Relationships are one of the strongest predictors of mood. If you're an avid bicyclist and can no longer cycle, that’s frustrating. But if cycling is the primary source of your social relationships, that’s even more frustrating."
"The conversation when you have a patient with chronic pain who is very depressed tends to [focus on] how we treat the pain," he continued. "Perhaps considering how the pain is affecting the people around the patient is also important... This is something that as a field we haven’t been paying very good attention to."
Previously: National survey reveals extent of Americans living with pain, Chronic pain: getting your head around it and Advances in pain research and treatment
Photo by rochelle hartman
