A study conducted by a team led by Dr. Tu Yiheng from the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed that individuals suffering from chronic pain in multiple areas of their body have an increased risk of developing dementia and experience a broader and quicker decline in cognitive functions such as memory, executive function, learning, and attention.
Nearly half of chronic pain patients experience multisite chronic pain, where they feel pain in multiple parts of their body, which significantly impacts their overall health. However, it was previously unclear whether individuals with multisite chronic pain experience exacerbated neurocognitive abnormalities.
In this study, after analyzing the records of 354,943 people in the UK Biobank cohort, the researchers found that the risk of neurocognitive abnormality increased with each additional pain site and was mediated by atrophy in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory.