J Rheumatol
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Clinic based studies suggest that adverse events in childhood may predispose to chronic pain in adult life. These have been conducted on highly selected groups, and it is unknown whether these relationships hold in the general population and to what extent the increased rate of adverse childhood events in persons with pain is an artefact of differential reporting. We examined the hypothesis that chronic widespread pain was associated with reports of adverse experiences in childhood and whether any observed relationships could be explained by differential recall. ⋯ Although several reported adverse events in childhood were observed to be associated with chronic widespread pain in adulthood, only reports of hospitalizations were significantly associated. Validation of self-reported exposures suggests that there was differential recall of past events among those with and without pain, and this differential recall explained the association between hospitalizations and current chronic pain. Such differential recall may explain other observations of an association between reports of adverse childhood events and chronic pain in adulthood.