Although gender differences in pain and analgesia are well known, it still remains unclear whether men and women vary in response to multimodal pain treatment. This study was conducted to investigate whether men and women exhibited different outcomes after an intensive multimodal pain treatment program. The daily outpatient program consisted of individual treatment as well as group therapy, with a total amount of therapy of 117.5h per patient. Overall, 496 patients (254 women) completed the multimodal program. Pretreatment parameters for pain, disability due to pain, pain duration, and pain chronicity stage, as well as age or psychiatric comorbidities, did not differ between genders. The average pain, measured with a Numeric Rating Scale, decreased after treatment of -1.54 (±1.96) with a large effect size (ES) of .911 for the total sample. However, there were considerable differences in the benefit for women (-1.83±2.12; ES 1.045) compared with men (-1.23±1.74; ES .758). Consistently, women (ES .694) improved more in pain-related disabilities in daily life than men (ES .436). These distinctions are not due to differences in pain duration, received medication, psychiatric comorbidities, pain chronicity stage, or application for a disability pension. Therefore, gender differences not only refer to chronic pain prevalence, pain perception, or experimental pain measurement, but also seem to have a clinically relevant impact on the response to pain therapy.

Research has shown that pain is associated with disability and that depressed mood mediates the relationship between pain and disability. The question of whether duration of pain moderates these effects was addressed in this cross-sectional study with 356 chronic pain patients. A simple mediation model replicated the notion that depressed mood explains a significant proportion of the relationship between pain and disability (in the study at hand: 12%). A moderated mediation model revealed that the indirect effect of pain on disability through depressed mood is moderated by pain duration: while depressed mood did not mediate the effect of pain on disability in chronic pain patients with shorter pain duration, depressed mood significantly mediated the effect pain exerts on disability in chronic pain patients with longer pain duration. Pain duration did not moderate the direct effect of pain on disability. Implications of these findings for the treatment of chronic pain might be that targeting depressed mood is especially relevant in chronic pain patients with longer pain duration to reduce the effect of pain on disability.

Chronic pain conditions are highly prevalent, with somatoform pain disorder accounting for a large proportion. However, the psychological forms of treatment currently used achieve only small to medium effect sizes. This retrospective study investigated the effectiveness of a 5-week multimodal pain program for patients with somatoform pain disorder. The diagnosis of somatoform pain disorder was confirmed by a specialist for anesthesiology and pain management and a specialist for psychosomatic medicine. Therapy outcome was evaluated with a Numeric Rating Scale (NRS), the Pain Disability Index (PDI), and the Pain Perception Scale. Within the study sample (n = 100), all parameters showed a significant and clinically relevant improvement at the end of therapy (P values < 0.001). The highest effect sizes (d) were found for reduction in average pain rating (NRS: d = 1.00) and the affective items of the Pain Perception Scale (SES-A: d = 0.07). The lowest effect sizes were found for improvement of pain-related disabilities (PDI: d = 0.42) and sensory items of the Pain Perception Scale (SES-S: d = 0.50). Despite high chronification of pain condition, with average pain duration of greater than 8 years, the multimodal treatment program showed medium to large effect sizes on the outcome of patients with somatoform pain disorder. Compared with previous data with small to moderate effect sizes, a multimodal program seems to be more effective than other interventions to address somatoform pain disorder.

Women with a depressive disorder and chronic pain benefit significantly more from a CBT-orientated multimodal treatment and exhibit a considerably greater reduction of depressive symptoms than do men. These distinctions are not due to differences in received antidepressant medication, psychiatric comorbidities or educational background.

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