Between a third and half of UK population lives with chronic pain, study suggests
A new study, published in BMJ Open, suggests that between a third and half of the UK population (43%) lives with chronic pain, which is roughly 28 million adults. The researchers analysed studies on population-based estimates of chronic pain – defined as lasting more than three months – chronic widespread pain, fibromyalgia, and chronic neuropathic pain.
The researchers say that this proportion is likely to rise as the population ages and warns that chronic pain is a major cause of disability and distress among those affected by it.
There is currently no consensus on the proportion of people living with long term pain in the UK, so with the aim of trying to get an accurate picture, researchers trawled relevant databases to find research of different types of pain, published after 1990.
From along 1,737 relevant articles, 19 studies, involving just under 140,000 adults, were seen as suitable for inclusion in the final analysis.
Researchers then pooled the study data and arrived at an estimate of the prevalence of chronic pain, overall, and chronic widespread pain. Summary estimates were also drawn up for moderate to severely disabling chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and chronic neuropathic pain among UK adults.
Findings include that the prevalence of chronic pain ranged from 35% to 51% of the adult population, with the prevalence of moderate to severely disabling chronic pain (based on four studies), ranging from 10% to 14%–equivalent to around 8 million people.
Pooling of the data showed that 43% of the population experience chronic pain, and 14% of UK adults live with chronic widespread pain. The summarized data also showed that 8% of UK adults experience chronic neuropathic pain, and 5.5% live with fibromyalgia.
It was also found that older people were more likely to live with pain over the long term and women were more likely than men to be affected by chronic pain, irrespective of age or pain time.
“Such prevalence data does not itself define need for care or targets for prevention, but reliable information on prevalence will help to drive public health and healthcare policymakers’ prioritisation of this important cause of distress and disability in the general population,” they conclude.
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