Association between Types of Pain Change and Depression among Korean Older Adults

Abstract

Background: The world's population is aging faster than it did in the past and many under-represented issues in the lives of older adults have been neglected; pain is one of the issues. Older people may regard their pain as incurable and may lead to not seeking appropriate medical treatment. It is hard to manage pain efficiently when individuals or society recognize that increased pain is a typical symptom of getting older. Considering the fact that pain negatively affects older adults, an in-depth review should be undertaken by categorizing changes in pain. Hence, the purpose of this study is to identify the types of pain changes that affect older Koreans 65 years and over, as well as their effects on depression.Methods: We analyzed the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLoSA) data collected from 2010 (3rd) to 2018 (7th). Data from a total of 1,359 participants, aged 65 or older were used to estimate the change in pain. A latent growth model was performed to estimate the overall change in pain and Growth Mixture Modeling (GMM) was performed to categorize the types of pain changes. Lastly, multiple regression analysis was performed to examine the effect of pain change types on depression among older adults.Results: The pain changes of older adults were classified into two categories: 'low-stable' (87.9%, n=1,194), and 'high increasing' (12.1%, n=165). Depression showed a stronger relationship among the high-increasing type of pain than the low-stable type (B=.844, p<.001). Upon examining the differences in demographic characteristics by type, the high-increasing type had a higher percentage of women, lower-income, relatively low educational attainment, and a higher percentage of rural residents than the low-stable type.Conclusions: The significance of this study lies in the fact that it reiterated the importance of early pain diagnosis and intervention by identifying the types of pain changes in older adults and analyzing their effects on depression. Therefore, it is especially important to pay attention to interventions that are designed to help vulnerable groups with a high risk of pain obtain effective pain management.