• Health Psychol · Nov 2013

    Controlled Clinical Trial

    Perceived racial discrimination, but not mistrust of medical researchers, predicts the heat pain tolerance of African Americans with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis.

    • Burel R Goodin, Quyen T Pham, Toni L Glover, Adriana Sotolongo, Christopher D King, Kimberly T Sibille, Matthew S Herbert, Yenisel Cruz-Almeida, Shelley H Sanden, Roland Staud, David T Redden, Laurence A Bradley, and Roger B Fillingim.
    • Department of Psychology.
    • Health Psychol. 2013 Nov 1;32(11):1117-26.

    ObjectiveStudies have shown that perceived racial discrimination is a significant predictor of clinical pain severity among African Americans. It remains unknown whether perceived racial discrimination also alters the nociceptive processing of painful stimuli, which, in turn, could influence clinical pain severity. This study examined associations between perceived racial discrimination and responses to noxious thermal stimuli among African Americans and non-Hispanic Whites. Mistrust of medical researchers was also assessed given its potential to affect responses to the noxious stimuli.MethodOne-hundred and 30 (52% African American, 48% non-Hispanic White) community-dwelling older adults with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis completed two study sessions. In session one, individuals provided demographic, socioeconomic, physical and mental health information. They completed questionnaires related to perceived lifetime frequency of racial discrimination and mistrust of medical researchers. In session two, individuals underwent a series of controlled thermal stimulation procedures to assess heat pain sensitivity, particularly heat pain tolerance.ResultsAfrican Americans were more sensitive to heat pain and reported greater perceived racial discrimination as well as greater mistrust of medical researchers compared with non-Hispanic Whites. Greater perceived racial discrimination significantly predicted lower heat pain tolerance for African Americans but not non-Hispanic Whites. Mistrust of medical researchers did not significantly predict heat pain tolerance for either racial group.ConclusionThese results lend support to the idea that perceived racial discrimination may influence the clinical pain severity of African Americans via the nociceptive processing of painful stimuli.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…