Biological markers and psychosocial factors predict chronic pain conditions, 2025, Fillingim

Dolphin

Dolphin

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
This contains a number of analyses that reference the CFS cohort.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02156-y
Biological markers and psychosocial factors predict chronic pain conditions
Nature Human Behaviour (2025)Cite this article

Abstract

Chronic pain is a multifactorial condition presenting significant diagnostic and prognostic challenges.

Biomarkers for the classification and the prediction of chronic pain are therefore critically needed.

Here, in this multidataset study of over 523,000 participants, we applied machine learning to multidimensional biological data from the UK Biobank to identify biomarkers for 35 medical conditions associated with pain (for example, rheumatoid arthritis and gout) or self-reported chronic pain (for example, back pain and knee pain).

Biomarkers derived from blood immunoassays, brain and bone imaging, and genetics were effective in predicting medical conditions associated with chronic pain (area under the curve (AUC) 0.62–0.87) but not self-reported pain (AUC 0.50–0.62).

Notably, all biomarkers worked in synergy with psychosocial factors, accurately predicting both medical conditions (AUC 0.69–0.91) and self-reported pain (AUC 0.71–0.92).

These findings underscore the necessity of adopting a holistic approach in the development of biomarkers to enhance their clinical utility.
 
Utsikt said:
I wonder how much of the psychosocial findings are driven by the fact that sick people answer differently on most of the questions and the lack of appropriate biomarkers for the given condition.
Click to expand...
Somewhere between 99% and 99.9%.

Most of this type of research can be summed as: health problems predict health problems. Simply because the questions they ask overlap with unrelated stuff. Even less useful than a weather rock, which is never wrong.

There's probably some useful stuff in there, but the psychosocial stuff is useless.
 
Skimming further: yup, weather rock. Rock wet? It rains/ed. Rock moving? Probably heavy wind. Rock gone? Possibly tornado. Or a thief.

Basically biomarkers aren't very useful yet because they haven't found them for pain. Which: duh. This is known. So psychosocial outcomes are a better variable, because asking people to rate their pain and/or symptoms generally works well enough. Not great, not terrible. But generally better than trying to use wrong measurements.

Problem is they do the usual thing where they take outcomes and reframe them as predictors. Turn this around and analyze them as outcomes, as they are, and this could be useful. But the hunger to find the medical philosopher's stone makes it impossible, so now we're stuck with the idea that if you could just keep the stone dry it would stop raining, and, even worse, if you could just wet the rock the right way it would make it rain, thus solving one of humanity's oldest and deepest fantasy: making it rain, as needed, just the right amount, where you want it, when you need it.

Might as well have shamans dancing our pain away. About zero difference.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top