Musculoskeletal pain is the most common pain type diagnosed in people with chronic pain and in people with long-term prescription opioid use. Especially back pain and arthrosis are common among these two groups. These findings are part of new study from researchers at SERAF and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. The research article is a more detailed description of the Preventing an Opioid Epidemic in Norway – Focusing on Treatment of Chronic Pain (POINT) project, which was published in the journal Clinical Epidemiology.
The POINT project is a large research consortium that aims to provide evidence to optimise chronic pain management and improve chronic pain patients’ pain relief and quality of life. The new publication describes the ongoing and the planned parts of the project with a special focus on the groups of people who are studied first: persons with chronic pain and persons with long-term prescription opioid use. Both of these groups were identified from Norwegian national healthcare registers and include 568,869 persons with chronic pain and 336,712 long-term opioid users.
These first descriptions of the two groups provide important information on the underlying diagnoses and their prevalence. For example, back pain was diagnosed in primary care among 28% of the persons with chronic pain and in 31% of the long-term opioid users in a one-year period. Also, mental health diagnoses were noticeably common in both groups. Research in the project will continue to investigate how the treatment of these people can be improved.
See also POINT project website