SynthesisPloS one2025
Navigating the biopsychosocial landscape: A systematic review on the association between social support and chronic pain.
Synthesis in PloS one, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social Support in Group Medical Visits for Chronic Pain in Primary Care.Annals of family medicine · 2026Trial
- "I'm afraid to eat a piece of toast": The Lived Experience of Balancing Eating and Health Behaviors in Adults with Chronic Pain.Journal of clinical psychology in medical settings · 2026Article
- Depressive symptoms in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: associations with quality of life, disease progression and perceived social support-a German multicenter study.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Analysis of health anxiety trajectories in rabies exposure patients based on machine learning.BMC public health · 2026Article
- TMD and Bruxism as Expressions of Central Regulatory State: The Functional Occlusion Regulated Model (FORM).Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Review
- The Therapeutic Home Environment for Chronic Diseases: A Transdisciplinary Ecosystem for Achieving Migraine Freedom and Managing Comorbid Anxiety, Insomnia, and Chronic Pain.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Everyday social contexts influence fluctuations into and out of chronic pain: an ethnographic study in England.BMJ open · 2026Article
- A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Patient Expectations in Individualised Anaesthesia and Analgesia: A Narrative Review and Future Directions.Journal of personalized medicine · 2026Review
- Social determinants of health equity for people with pain: from understanding to action.Pain reports · 2026Article
- Impact of Menopause and Associated Hormonal Changes on Spine Health in Older Females: A Review.Cells · 2026Review
- The intrinsic reason why the term "central sensitization" should be refined, by introducing the terms "spinal sensitization", "pain-related brain network sensitization", and "psychosocial-related sensitization".Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The Experience of Social Alienation in Patients with Chronic Cancer-Related Pain: A Qualitative Study.Journal of pain research · 2026Article
- Patient involvement in the biopsychosocial integrated primary care model: A qualitative study in three health districts of South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The biopsychosocial model is widely used to explain chronic pain conditions. Yet, the role of social aspects including social support is not clear. Literature on social support and chronic pain is still sparse and results inconsistent. The aim of this review is to evaluate the association between social support and different aspects of chronic pain such as pain intensity, pain interference, quality of life, depression and anxiety. We performed a search on Pubmed, Embase, PsycINFO, Cochrane Library, Scopus and CINAHL database entries between January 1, 1980 and May 7, 2024. Two independent investigators selected all longitudinal (prospective or retrospective) and cross-sectional studies in adult populations investigating the effect of perceived social support, social support satisfaction or spousal responses on different aspects of chronic pain (persistent or recurrent pain lasting longer than 3 months). Out of 11,908 queried results, 67 studies met our inclusion criteria. After assessing for risk of bias (adapted version of the "JBI Critical Appraisal Checklist for Analytical Cross-Sectional Studies") and quality of evidence (adapted version of the quality assessment tool of Hawker and al.), 35 studies were included in the final analysis. We found that perceived social support was positively associated with quality of life and negatively associated with depression. Social support satisfaction was negatively associated with depression. Spousal responses were positively associated with pain intensity, pain interference and depression. This review found that, in patients with chronic pain, social support is mainly associated with psychological variables. However, most studies were cross-sectional, and most analyses were correlations. There is a need for higher quality longitudinal studies. The type of social support studied should be clearly defined in every study.
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