• Petter C Borchgrevink, Mari Glette, Astrid Woodhouse, Stephen Butler, Tormod Landmark, Pål Romundstad, Ola Dale, Tore C Stiles, Kaare H Bonaa, Dagfinn Thorsvik, Sabina Thünte, and Stein Kaasa.
• Department of Pain and Complex Disorders, Clinic of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, St. Olavs Hospital, Trondheim, Norway; Department of Circulation and Medical Imaging, Faculty of Medicine, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. Electronic address: petter.borchgrevink@ntnu.no.
• J Pain. 2022 Feb 1; 23 (2): 337-348.

AbstractThe purpose was to present a total description, distribution, and ranking of chronic pain conditions in the general population. This was based on structured clinical examinations of a random sample from a population-based survey (HUNT3) with a calculated oversampling of participants with chronic pain. Supplemented with access to hospital reports, the examination was performed by experienced physicians and psychologists using a consistent definition of chronic pain as well as ICD-10- and the new ICD-11-classification. The main findings were that a higher proportion of the 551 participants had chronic pain assessed by clinical examination (399) than by self-report in a survey the same day (337). Among those with examination-verified chronic pain estimated from HUNT3 to represent 27.9% of the general population, 63% had chronic primary pain, 81% musculoskeletal pain, and 77% more than one chronic pain condition. When separating chronic primary from chronic secondary pain according to ICD-11, the weighted prevalence was 17.7% for chronic pain conditions of unknown and 10.2% of known cause. When all the participants' conditions were accounted for, the most prevalent was nonspecific low back (10.8%) and neck pain (7.6%). Participants with chronic primary pain did not have significantly more psychopathology than those with chronic secondary pain: 14.5% versus 12.5%. PERSPECTIVE: Since this study confirms the high prevalence in self-report surveys and indicates that two thirds of chronic pain conditions cannot be explained by underlying diseases, this huge health and societal problem should be solved primarily on a public health level directed toward prevention and rehabilitation.Copyright © 2021 United States Association for the Study of Pain, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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