ArticleBritish journal of pain2025
The association between chronic pain and deficits in attention: Is it mediated by disturbed sleep?
Article in British journal of pain, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sustained Attention Instability as a Cognitive Biomarker in Chronic Spine Pain: A 90-second Visual Attention Test.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2026Article
- Menopause-related brain fog as a midlife window in women's brain aging: toward ecologically valid measurement and digital phenotyping.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
Objective: Persons with chronic pain suffer from additional symptoms and deficits that are directly or indirectly related to their condition. Attentional deficits are a common problem in these individuals. The same is true for sleep disturbances. It is well-known that night sleep affects attention the next day. Therefore, sleep disturbances might be responsible for the association between chronic pain and deficits in attention. Methods: We studied the gaze behaviour (absolute and relative fixation times, i.e., attentional biases) in patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain ( Results: Patients with chronic pain exhibited overall shorter fixation times (on average ∼160 ms shorter fixation times). With respect to the attentional biases, all participants looked longer at the affective faces compared to the neutral ones, independent of group or type of affective stimulus. Several subjective sleep/wellbeing parameters, together with two PSG parameters (sleep efficiency and duration of awakenings), were significantly worse in patients with chronic pain. Despite this, only subjective sleep quality and sleep efficiency mediated the association of chronic pain and attentional processes. Conclusions: Our findings confirm previous studies showing attentional deficits and sleep disturbances in patients with chronic pain. However, our results only partially support the hypothesis that the relationship between chronic pain and altered attentional processes is due to disturbed sleep. Other mechanisms might be involved, highlighting the need for further studies.
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