Reducing physical pain
Identifying and addressing highly prevalent and intensely painful conditions
This profile is tailored towards students studying biological sciences, economics, health sciences, philosophy, psychology, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
The scale of physical pain caused by medical conditions is considerable; in the US in 2019 for example, 20% of adults reported chronic pain in the previous 3 months, with 7.4% reporting ‘high impact chronic pain’ – pain most or all days that limited their life or work activities.
Some specific physical conditions stand out as particularly important to address due to their prevalence and/or intensity. For example, pain from terminal conditions such as advanced cancer and HIV can cause intense suffering and in low and middle-income countries only 5% of the resulting need for opioids is met. HLI states that ‘cancer and HIV cause over 700 million … moderate to severe pain days.’ Lower back pain is the leading cause of years lived with disability worldwide, while migraines affect 1 in 6 people and impose a burden of disease in DALYs roughly comparable with malaria or depression. While cluster headaches affect far fewer people at 0.1-0.2% of the global population, they are particularly agonising and therefore may still be a particularly important problem to work on.
For more information see: this summary of the societal impact of headaches; this literature review on cluster headaches; this cost-effectiveness analysis of interventions for migraine in low- and middle-income countries and this review of preventative and treatment options for lower back pain. You can also watch the video below for a short explanation of cluster and migraine headaches.
Contributors: This profile was last significantly updated on 5/01/2022. Thanks to Joel McGuire for helpful feedback on this profile. All mistakes remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
