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Memory concerns relate to recall differently by pain status

In a two-year observational study of 575 older Puerto Rican adults, memory difficulty was linked to poorer current recall with chronic pain and later decline without it.

Paper by Tyler Reed Bell, Sadaf Arefi Milani, Caitlin A. Northcutt, +3 more authorsMichael G. Crowe · University of California San Diego · University of Alabama at Birmingham
Figure 1. Differences in episodic memory by perceived memory difficulty and chronic pain status.
Open the figure at full size
Figure 1. Differences in episodic memory by perceived memory difficulty and chronic pain status.Differences in episodic memory by perceived memory difficulty and chronic pain status.Bell et al.

Our read

Populations
Studied:
Cohort study of 433 Puerto Rican older adults without cognitive impairment, approximately 2 years
What changed:
Memory difficulty tracked future recall decline without chronic pain, but not with chronic pain
The catch:
The chronic pain definition could misclassify transient pain as chronic pain
Why it’s aging research:
It measures an outcome that worsens with age.

Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News

Paper
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An observational cohort study followed 575 community-dwelling older Puerto Rican adults without cognitive impairment, with a mean age of 83.90; 61.9% were female. Researchers reassessed 433 participants about two years later. They defined chronic pain as pain reported at baseline and in earlier study waves.

Poorer self-rated memory was associated with worse initial thinking and memory scores and greater subsequent decline in recalling words. The pattern differed by pain status. Among participants with chronic pain, poorer self-rated memory was linked to worse word recall at baseline, but not to later decline. Among those without chronic pain, it was linked to later decline, but not to baseline word recall. Reports that memory had worsened over the previous two years were not associated with initial scores or subsequent change. Analyses accounted for age, sex, education and depressive symptoms.

Why it matters

Memory concerns can be an early sign of cognitive risk in older adults. The study addresses whether chronic pain matters when interpreting those concerns.

Caveats

This observational study cannot establish cause and effect, and repeated pain reports were not a clinical diagnosis of chronic pain. The findings do not cover people with cognitive impairment or those unable to answer the interview themselves.

From the paper

Limitation

The observed effect sizes were small (βs ∼.20), which may limit clinical significance for any individual patient.

Discussion

Quoted word for word from the full text on PubMed Central.

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