A group of medical researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered that people experiencing persistent pains all over their body are more likely to develop dementia, which means they will have much worse memory, learning, attention, and decision-making abilities. The findings were recently published in a well-known journal called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Around half of people who have long-term pain feel it in different parts of their body. This really impacts their health. Before now, we hadn’t been sure if people with multiple areas of chronic pain have a worse time with thinking and learning.
Scientists took a look at 354,943 people in the UK and noticed that for each part of the body that had pain, the risk of having an issue with memory went up. This is because pain affects an area of the brain called the hippocampus which helps with remembering things.
Hippocampal volume gradually decreases with age and the researchers noticed this pattern in patients with chronic pain in multiple parts of their body. According to Dr. Tu, who led the study, this pain may speed up hippocampal aging in a way that could affect people’s thinking skills. This means that multisite chronic pain is similar to aging eight years quicker than normal for healthy individuals whose average age is 60.
This study investigated the connection between chronic pain and dementia. It showed that chronic pain is connected to decreased thinking and processing skills, in addition to putting extra strain on people’s brains. The research also pointed out the need for more studies on the many forms of chronic pain and how they affect people’s minds.
This research was sponsored by the STI2030-Major Projects Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Scientific Foundation of the Institute of Psychology of CAS. It is about how chronic pain can increase your risk for dementia and cause your thinking skills to get worse and even shrink an area in your brain called the “hippocampus”.
