Pain Rehabilitation Program Benefits Older Adults With Chronic Pain

Recent research presented at the American Academy of Pain Medicine 2017 Annual Meeting showed that an interdisciplinary chronic rehabilitation program helped to treat older patients with chronic pain. 

“A hurdle to treating patients with more advanced age is that they will frequently present with complex medical comorbidities,” Kelly Martincin, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Cleveland Clinic, and lead author of the study, said in a press release. “The power of an interdisciplinary program is in multiple clinicians sitting down together to examine a patient’s unique concerns from a number of different angles, and this is especially important for patients who present with complex comorbidities.”

According to the study, about 50% of older adults experience chronic pain; however, best practices for treating chronic pain among older adults are still understudied. In order to widen the breadth of research on this topic, Dr Martinicin and colleagues studied the effectiveness of interdisciplinary chronic pain rehabilitation programs at treating older patients. They conducted a retrospective study of 225 older adults, aged older than 60 years, in chronic pain rehabilitation programs between 2007 and 2012. These results were compared to results from 1249 younger adults studied during the same time period. 

The researchers hypothesized that “both groups would benefit equally from treatment in terms of pain intensity, depression, and anxiety and that these factors as well as opiate prescription would predict functional impairment in both groups.”

Study results showed that all patients showed significant improvement across all of the outcomes studied (P < .001).  However, the researchers determined that older adults may have benefited more from interdisciplinary chronic pain rehabilitation programs in some treatment outcomes. 

“Physicians are always seeking the safest and most effective forms of treatment and prefer options that will not run the risks of impairing cognition, increase fall risks, etcetera,” Dr Martincin said in the press release. “Establishing the value of an interdisciplinary program for the older adult non-cancer chronic pain population specifically provides physicians another tool to offer their patients.”—David Costill