10% of Americans Struggle With Chronic Pain

And one in four adults suffered a daylong bout of pain in past month, report found.

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
Wednesday, November 15, 2006; 12:00 AM

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WEDNESDAY, Nov. 15 (HealthDay News) -- If you suffer from prolonged pain, you're not alone -- 25 percent of American adults say they've experienced pain that lasts at least one day and 10 percent say they've lived with pain that persists a year or more.

These findings are among many others contained in the U.S. government's annual report on the nation's well-being, Health United States, 2006, released Wednesday.

But the report also contains some encouraging statistics. Among them: life expectancy has hit a record high; the infant mortality rate is falling; and deaths from heart disease are down, although it remains the nation's number-one killer. Less encouraging is the news that the diabetes epidemic continues to threaten more Americans.

"We are living longer, and we have more chronic conditions," said lead author Amy Bernstein, chief of the analytic studies branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. "Diabetes rates are increasing, obesity rates are increasing. And as people live longer they get more chronic conditions, including pain."

This year's report highlights pain. "Pain is even more common than people might have thought," Bernstein said. "But pain is rarely discussed as a condition in and of itself. It is mostly viewed as a symptom of another condition."

According to the report, 21 percent of adults aged 65 and older said they had experienced pain in the past month that lasted for more than 24 hours. And almost three-fifths of adults 65 and older said their pain had lasted a year or more.

Over one-quarter of adults said they had low back pain in the past three months. Fifteen percent complained of migraine or severe headache in the past three months. And adults aged 18 to 44 were almost three times more likely than adults 65 and older to report migraines or severe headaches.

Severe joint pain increases with age, and women reported severely painful joints more often than men. "It's likely as the population gets older and fatter we will see more joint pain," Berstein said.