Have American Pain-Reporting Styles Changed Over Time? An Assessment Using Objective Measures of Function

• In Event: 3264 - Mortality and Morbidity

Abstract

In recent years, a number of prominent writers have argued that Americans’ thresholds for pain have lowered over the past two decades——a result of widespread aggressive marketing of prescription analgesics, and of regulatory changes leading to more frequent discussion and treatment of pain in clinical encounters. However, this claim has not been evaluated empirically. We examine the association between self-reported pain intensity and an objective measure of pain-related physical function (a timed walk test) over a 12-year period to assess whether pain-reporting styles have changed over time among older American adults. Using 7 waves of data (2004-2016) from the Health and Retirement Study (N=12,885 / 24,725 person-waves) and linear random-effects models controlling for age and sex, we find no evidence of systematic changes in pain reporting. These results suggest that the rising rates of chronic pain observed in the U.S. are unlikely to be an artefact of changing reporting norms, but likely reflect a true increase in chronic pain prevalence.

Authors

• Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk, University at Buffalo, SUNY

• Anna Zajacova, University of Western Ontario

• Zachary Zimmer, Mount St. Vincent University