Chronic pain: Evidence from the national child development study, 2022, Blanchflower

Abstract
Using data from all those born in a single week in 1958 in Britain we track associations between short pain and chronic pain in mid-life (age 44) and subsequent health, wellbeing and labor market outcomes in later life. We focus on data taken at age 50 in 2008, when the Great Recession hit and then five years later at age 55 in 2013 and again at age 62 in 2021 during the Covid pandemic. We find those suffering both short-term and chronic pain at age 44 continue to report pain and poor general health in their 50s and 60s. However, the associations are much stronger for those with chronic pain. Furthermore, chronic pain at age 44 is associated with a range of poor mental health outcomes, pessimism about the future and joblessness at age 55 whereas short-duration pain at age 44 is not. Pain has strong predictive power for pain later in life: pain in childhood predicts pain in mid-life, even when one controls for pain in early adulthood. Pain appears to reflect other vulnerabilities as we find that chronic pain at age 44 predicts whether or not a respondent has Covid nearly twenty years later.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275095

 

Not sure how much credibility can be given to this piece, considering that it was co-written by the infamous Danny Blanchflower who was trolling ME sufferers on Twitter in 2019 with his insistence that because rehabilitation fixed his broken ankle, it was definitely a cure for ME. When ME patients tried to educate him re his erroneous beliefs about ME, he blocked them and everyone who liked their posts (myself included, just for liking posts, I never interacted with him).

https://twitter.com/user/status/1093526570520711168


Apparently he's good mates with Prof Peter White, which likely explains a lot about his odd beliefs about ME...

 

Wow. No way. Chronic pain is associated with.. chronic pain?! What an outstanding discovery! Stop the presses. As in we won't need them anymore after this single greatest nugget of scientific knowledge is disseminated. And poor health has consequences? No. Way!

So it turns out that people are pretty good at assessing their own health, but medicine disagrees we should be, so it's discounted and the usual irrelevant psychosocial factors are trotted out, as is tradition.

There is actual ideology out there that thinks much the same about poverty. This is basically arguing that poor people, who assess themselves are poor, usually remains poor later in life, but arguing it must be about their poverty thoughts and how they're negative nancies who are all about being sad and poor. Weak.

 

@rvallee LOL! Those were my same immediate thoughts on reading that abstract of stating the blindingly obvious! And yes, then trotting out totally lame psychosocial stuff as if it's something 'meaningful'.

And I loved this:

Seriously? How does that work, exactly?

 

Chronic long-term pain = poor mental health. No ***t Sherlock!

 

I wouldn't criticise a study for either examining the obvious nor from stating the obvious - the absence of obvious data is frequently a block to progress. Blancheflower is as they say 'a character' and he made an arse of himself with his 'broken ankle' intervention, however he is well respected in his field, and at a skim reading I can't see this as being something dreadful. That chronic pain at one point in life should be significantly predictive of later chronic pain, unemployment and proneness to subsequent additional ill health are important observations when supported by data. Research that supports greater attention to chronic pain by both medicine and public policy would seem to be positive.