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- All Subjects: Chronic Pain
- Creators: Davis, Mary
Health and Wealthness is a podcast where your hosts, Emily Weigel and Hanaa Khan discuss pressing and trending topics about health and wealth that everyone should know about. Our first four episodes focus on the opioid crisis. Both the science and healthcare sides. We then go on to talk about burnout and mental health in a conversational episode.
Pediatric chronic pain is common and costly to children, their families, and society. Importantly, pediatric pain often persists into adulthood. Prior research suggests that parent chronic pain, particularly maternal pain, is a risk factor for the development of chronic pain in children. Existing evidence also suggests that parenting, including parental pain-related pain catastrophizing and general parenting style, are all associated with greater levels of chronic pain in children. The present study examined whether the prospective relations between parent and child pain differed between mothers and fathers, and whether parenting mediated or moderated the parent pain--child pain relations. It was hypothesized that 1a) both maternal and paternal chronic pain prospectively predicts child chronic pain, but that maternal pain would be a stronger predictor; 1b) having 0, 1, or 2 parents will increase the child’s risk of developing chronic pain; 2) maternal pain catastrophizing about their own (a) and their children’ pain (b) would mediate the relations between maternal and child pain; and 3) authoritarian parenting style (a) and negative parenting behaviors (b) would mediate the relationship between parent and child pain. Exploratory analyses tested the whether parental warmth predicted child pain, independent of mom pain. Regression models that account for twin dependency used longitudinal data collected from a sample of 895 twin children showed that maternal pain but not paternal pain predicted child pain. Maternal catastrophizing of her own pain, but not her child’s pain, significantly mediated the relation between maternal and child pain. However, maternal catastrophizing of her child’s pain predicted child pain at age 9, when controlling for child pain at age 8. All proposed relations between general parenting styles as well as warm parenting and child pain were not significant.
Pediatric chronic pain is common and predicts risk for psychological and pain problems into adulthood. Biopsychosocial risk factors for the development of chronic pediatric pain have been examined, but the key health behavior of caloric consumption has not been explored. Adult and animal data suggest that caloric intake is positively related to chronic pain, and that adiposity and stress-related biological factors may serve as potential mediators. This study predicted that among children: 1) adiposity, flattened diurnal cortisol slopes, and caloric consumption are related to chronic pain, and 2) the caloric consumption—pain relation is mediated by elevated adiposity and/or flattened diurnal cortisol slopes. Methods: Twin children (N = 733) were drawn from the Arizona Twin Project sample. Measures included caregiver-reported caloric intake via five daily food diaries (Age-8); adiposity (composite of waist circumference, body mass index, body fat percentage) and diurnal cortisol slopes via three days of salivary cortisol sampling (Age-9); and caregiver-reported monthly chronic pain (Age-10). Results: Multilevel models (accounting for clustering within families) with sex, age, socioeconomic status, puberty, race/ethnicity as covariates, showed that caloric intake predicted greater waist circumference, which in turn predicted elevated chronic pain. However, adiposity, waist circumference, and diurnal cortisol slopes did not mediate the caloric intake-chronic pain relation. Discussion: Consistent with the literature, caloric intake predicted adiposity, and adiposity predicted pain in a diverse sample of children. More comprehensive assessment of behavioral (sleep, diet quality) and biopsychosocial factors (e.g. inflammation, cortisol; injury; catastrophizing) may aid efforts to prevent pediatric chronic pain.