In a new study, researchers have found that the prevalence of chronic pain is increasing for all demographics of U.S. adults.
The research, which appears in the journal Demography, highlights that the prevalence of chronic pain has increased the most for people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
“We looked at the data from every available perspective, including age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, and income, but the results were always the same: There was an increase in pain no matter how we classified the population,” says Dr. Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk, associate professor of sociology in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, and co-author of the paper.
“You might think that with medical advances, we’d be getting healthier and experiencing less pain, but the data strongly suggest the exact opposite,” Dr. Grol-Prokopczyk says.