Department of Sociology, Center for Demography and Ecology, Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States.
La Follette School of Public Affairs, Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States.
Soc Sci Med. 2024 Apr;346:116692. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116692. Epub 2024 Feb 23.
Current studies have indicated that the number of individuals living with pain has risen in recent years, with nearly half of all adults in some countries living with some form of pain. Such trends have prompted researchers to explore differences in pain across different sociodemographic groups, with a dominant focus on educational attainment. However, much of the studies fail to consider the confounding role of early life characteristics, such as family background. Using data on over 400,000 individuals from the UK Biobank, we look at how educational attainment is associated with nine different domains of pain (headache, facial, neck, back, hip, knee, stomach, all over, and no pain). Ultimately, we find that compared to those with no educational credentials, education is associated with anywhere between a 0.1-15% change in the likelihood of reporting pain, depending on pain type and education level, with the greatest change occurring in those with the highest level. Yet, when accounting for family background characteristics in the form of sibling fixed effects, nearly all relationships between education and pain fell by either 50% or were eliminated. We ultimately conclude that failure to consider early life characteristics, such as family background characteristics may lead to inflated estimates of pain, and that future research should delve into early life exposures and their influence on pain in adulthood.
目前的研究表明，近年来患有疼痛的人数有所增加，在一些国家几乎有一半的成年人患有某种形式的疼痛。这些趋势促使研究人员探索不同社会人口群体之间的疼痛差异，主要关注教育程度。然而，许多研究都没有考虑到童年特征（如家庭背景）的混杂作用。我们使用来自英国生物库的超过 40 万人的数据，研究了教育程度与九种不同类型的疼痛（头痛、面部、颈部、背部、臀部、膝盖、胃部、全身和无痛）之间的关联。最终，我们发现与没有教育背景的人相比，教育程度与报告疼痛的可能性变化在 0.1%到 15%之间，具体取决于疼痛类型和教育水平，变化最大的是那些教育水平最高的人。然而，当以兄弟姐妹固定效应的形式考虑家庭背景特征时，教育与疼痛之间的几乎所有关系要么降低了 50%，要么完全消失了。我们最终得出的结论是，不考虑童年特征（如家庭背景特征）可能会导致对疼痛的估计过高，未来的研究应该深入探讨童年时期的暴露及其对成年期疼痛的影响。
