People with chronic pain in multiple parts of the body had a higher risk of dementia and experienced faster cognitive decline, including memory, executive function, learning, and attention.
The findings are taken from a new study, led by Dr TU Yiheng from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published online in the journal PNAS on 2o February.
Multisite chronic pain, where pain is experienced in multiple anatomical locations, affects almost half of chronic pain patients and has been found to place a greater burden on patients’ overall health.
However, it has not been clear whether people with multisite chronic pain suffered from aggravated neurocognitive abnormalities.
In this study, after analysing the records of 354,943 people in the UK Biobank cohort, the researchers found that the risk of neurocognitive abnormality increased with each additional pain site and was mediated by atrophy in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory.
Since hippocampal volume decreases with age, the researchers equated the magnitude of the effect of hippocampal atrophy in patients with multisite chronic pain to the effect of ageing in healthy people with an average age of 60.
The study provides a quantitative understanding of the impact of chronic pain on cognitive function and the risk of dementia, laying an important foundation for future research into the relationship between chronic pain and cognitive impairment.
It also highlights the excessive burden of multisite chronic pain on patients’ cognition and the brain, and the need to address the overlapping nature of pain conditions in both basic research and clinical studies.
Dr TU, corresponding author of the study, commented: “Multisite chronic pain may lead to up to eight years of accelerated hippocampal ageing, an effect that may underlie a series of cognitive burdens.”
