Physical pain often peaks during your working years, not in old age

The world’s largest, most comprehensive source of information for scientists and doctors to assess diseases and health worldwide is the Global Burden of Diseases study. Yet its dozens of parameters do not include one on a leading cause of disability worldwide: pain.

But it is too easy to blame the study for this oversight: “For pain, there are no medical biomarkers and the best we can do is to ask a person about their subjective experience,” Matthew Fillingim, a researcher at McGill University, Canada, said.

Dr. Fillingim, along with 98 researchers from 63 institutions worldwide, gathered data and studied subjective experiences of pain from 6.1 million individuals from 118 countries, aged 5-100 years, between 1995 and 2005. They recently published their findings in Nature Medicine.