STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — New cases of chronic pain now occur more often among American adults than diabetes, depression and high blood pressure, a federal study found, demonstrating how consistent pain has become in the United States.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) research, published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open, delved into reports of pain among 10,415 participants across two years of an annual Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey in 2020 and 2021.
Chronic pain, which is experienced on most days or every day over the most recent three-month span, affects 21% of U.S. adults, the study found, and high-impact chronic pain — a level of pain that limits life or work activities on at least most days — ails an additional 8% of adults.
“Understanding incidence, beyond overall prevalence, is critical to understanding how chronic pain manifests and evolves over time,” said Dr. Richard Nahin, a lead author of the study and an epidemiologist at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, in a release. “These data on pain progression stress the need for increased use of multimodal, multidisciplinary interventions able to change the course of pain and improve outcomes for people.”
The study compared new incidences of chronic pain compared to a baseline status in 2019 and underscored the stark challenges facing a country battling an opioid epidemic intrinsically linked to pain management.
For every 1,000 U.S. adults, there were 52.4 new cases of chronic pain, according to the study. Comparatively, there were 45.3 cases of hypertension, 15.9 cases of depression and 7.1 cases of diabetes for every 1,000 people.
However, only around one in six people who reported non-chronic pain in 2019 said their pain became chronic in 2020. Those findings highlight the need for early pain management, the researchers said.
Chronic pain, meanwhile, was pervasively persistent, affecting 61.4% of people for at least a year. Around 190 of every…
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