ArticlesGender and minority differences in the pain experience of people with spinal cord injury1☆,
Section snippets
Methods
People with traumatic-onset SCI who are in the NSCISC database are treated currently in 16 geographically dispersed MSCIS in the United States. The gender distribution of that database since its inception has been a 4:1 male to female ratio. The race distribution is currently as follows: white, 67.4%; African American, 21.8%; other, 1.1%; Asian, 1.5%; American Indian, 1%; and 7.2% coded “unknown.” Data were extracted for people with SCI who had responded to questions about pain severity and the
Results
There were 7379 cases in the database with at least some pain data at 1 of the 6 follow-up years. Subjects with incomplete data for the variables used in this analysis were excluded (see fig 1 for a review of recruitment and attrition for the samples used). Subjects with and without available pain data were compared. There was no statistically significant difference in the percentage of women or in the rate of complete injury between the 2 groups.
However, there was a significant difference in
Overall prevalence
The overall 80.5% prevalence of pain found in this sample of people with traumatic SCI—the largest yet reported—is similar to or greater than that found by most others, including all of the studies with the largest previously reported samples.3, 31, 32 The overall prevalence of pain in the other samples were (1) 66% for pain and distressing dysesthesias in 901 consecutive inpatients or outpatients at 4 SCI centers in Germany3; (2) 82% for a persistent, bothersome pain problem in a postal survey
Conclusions
Pain is a common and significant problem for people with SCI. Our data suggest that the prevalence of pain is substantial (80% of people with SCI report pain) and stable over time, as is average reported pain severity. Pain appears to interfere less frequently with work over time, however, which suggests that an adaptive process may occur. That inference can only be truly verified, however, by a longitudinal analysis, not the cross-sectional analysis to which we were limited in this study.
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Supported by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services, US Department of Education (grant no. H133N000003) and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (grant no. DK51413).
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No commercial party having a direct financial interest in the results of the research supporting this article has or will confer a benefit upon the authors or upon any organization with which the authors are associated.