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Chronic Pain In America: Roadblocks To Relief

Foreward

Background

The overall purpose of this study was to identify the barriers or problems individuals face in their efforts to achieve relief from moderate to severe chronic pain. The information will be used to heighten the awareness and understanding of consumers and the medical community on the issue of chronic pain and the need to treat it aggressively.

The study covers how chronic pain impacts quality of life, whether chronic pain sufferers have their pain under control or not, how they are able to get to a control status, whether or not the treatment used goes far enough and what barriers or stigmas are related to pain treatment in general and to the medicine being taken for pain.

Methodology

A national mail panel was screened to identify eligible chronic pain sufferers. This was the most efficient means to locate eligible respondents due to the relatively low incidence of eligibility. To be eligible for this study individuals had to satisfy the following eligibility criteria:

  • Be at least 18 years of age;
  • Have pain that is constant or flares up frequently;
  • Have experienced such pain for at least 6 months;
  • The severity of the pain (measured on a 1 to 10 scale where 1 meant no pain at all and 10 the worst pain imaginable) is at least a '5';
  • The pain is not cancer related (a considerable amount of data about cancer pain is currently available from other studies).

The mail panel consists of over 500,000 households and is representative of all households in the U.S. A total of 35,000 screening questionnaires was sent to a random cross-section of the total panel. The total return was 29,474 completed screeners and from this return 2,642 met the eligibility criteria. Telephone follow-up interviews were completed with 805 individuals who met the above eligibility criteria, i.e., sufferers of moderate to severe chronic pain.

The findings are projectable to all panel sufferers of moderate to severe non-cancer related chronic pain who in turn are representative of all such sufferers in the U.S. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points. Subgroups will have a larger margin of sampling error.

All interviewing was conducted during October and November 1998.

On to: Conclusions

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