Life events stress and chronic pain

Stress in life has been found to play a role in triggering, maintaining and exacerbating chronic pain, yet, direct empirical evidence of the mechanism of such a role is limited. In the present study 120 non-selected chronic pain patients and an equal number of matched healthy normals were investigated with regard to life events stress. The investigation revealed that although, patients and controls did not differ in terms of number of events experienced during the last 1 year, however, patients reported significantly higher frequency of occurrence on a distinctive set of events belonging to personal, interpersonal and familial life and events related to change in eating and sleeping habits. Our results emphasize the importance of studying the life events beyond the simple count of number of event occurrence but to explore the specific events those cluster around pain disorders.