ArticlePain2020
Chronic noncancer pain is not associated with accelerated brain aging as assessed by structural magnetic resonance imaging in patients treated in specialized outpatient clinics.
Article in Pain, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review of brain health in adults with chronic pain.Anaesthesia · 2026Pooled it
- Article
- Chronic Pain and Cognitive Dysfunction: Clinical Implement, Mechanism, and Therapeutic Strategy.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Article
- More than chronic pain: behavioural and psychosocial protective factors predict lower brain age in adults with/at risk of knee osteoarthritis over two years.Brain communications · 2025Article
- Increased MRI-based Brain Age in chronic migraine patients.The journal of headache and pain · 2023Article
- Brain-predicted age difference mediates the association between PROMIS sleep impairment, and self-reported pain measure in persons with knee pain.Aging brain · 2023Article
- Emotional dysregulation in women with endometriosis with cyclical and non-cyclical chronic pelvic pain.BMC women's health · 2022Article
- Heart rate and heart rate variability in patients with chronic inflammatory joint disease: the role of pain duration and the insular cortex.BMC musculoskeletal disorders · 2022Article
- Cross-Sectional Brain-Predicted Age Differences in Community-Dwelling Middle-Aged and Older Adults with High Impact Knee Pain.Journal of pain research · 2022Article
- Persistent Non-pharmacological Pain Management and Brain-Predicted Age Differences in Middle-Aged and Older Adults With Chronic Knee Pain.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Data Science Trends Relevant to Nursing Practice: A Rapid Review of the 2020 Literature.Applied clinical informatics · 2022Review
- Brain-predicted age difference is associated with cognitive processing in later-life.Neurobiology of aging · 2022Article
- Chronic Pain in the Elderly: Mechanisms and Distinctive Features.Biomolecules · 2021Review
- Replicability, Repeatability, and Long-term Reproducibility of Cerebellar Morphometry.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2021Article
- Article
- Analysis of Epigenetic Age Predictors in Pain-Related Conditions.Frontiers in public health · 2020Article
- Editorial: Chronic Orofacial Pain in Older Adults.Journal of oral & facial pain and headacheArticle
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Chronic pain is often associated with changes in brain structure and function, and also cognitive deficits. It has been noted that these chronic pain-related alterations may resemble changes found in healthy aging, and thus may represent accelerated or premature aging of the brain. Here, we test the hypothesis that patients with chronic noncancer pain demonstrate accelerated brain aging compared with healthy control subjects. The predicted brain age of 59 patients with chronic pain (mean chronological age ± SD: 53.0 ± 9.0 years; 43 women) and 60 pain-free healthy controls (52.6 ± 9.0 years; 44 women) was determined using the software brainageR. This software segments the individual T1-weighted structural MR images into gray and white matter and compares gray and white matter images with a large (n = 2001) training set of structural images, using machine learning. Finally, brain age delta, which is the predicted brain age minus chronological age, was calculated and compared across groups. This study provided no evidence for the hypothesis that chronic pain is associated with accelerated brain aging (Welch t test, P = 0.74, Cohen's d = 0.061). A Bayesian independent-samples t test indicated moderate evidence in favor of the null hypothesis (BF01 = 4.875, ie, group means were equal). Our results provide indirect support for recent models of pain-related changes of brain structure, brain function, and cognitive functions. These models postulate network-specific maladaptive plasticity, rather than widespread or global neural degeneration.
Indexed as
Identifiers
31764393What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.