Purpose:  To investigate the relationship, adjusting for age and gender, between chronic pain level and scores on a preference-based measure of health status.

Methods:  A sample of 1009 primary care patients with self-reported chronic pain, most of who were being treated with narcotics, completed a series of questionnaires to assess their health status.  Based on these patients' RAND-36 data, the Short Form 6-D (SF-6D) algorithm of Brazier, et al. (2002) was used to derive a preference-based score of health status.  Mean health status scores were then calculated for patients experiencing different levels of pain, which were assessed by ratings of average pain in the previous month on the Brief Pain Inventory.

 

Results:  The figures show the means and 95% confidence intervals for health status scores. Little variation in the scores is evident across pain levels and age groups, and no consistent trend in the data is apparent.  All scores tend to cluster around the overall mean score of 0.6257.

Conclusions:  Preference-based health status measurements appear to be relatively insensitive to variation in level of pain, irrespective of adjustment for age and gender. However, lack of variation in scores may in part be due to the fact that most of the patients in this sample were being treated with narcotics for their pain.  Performing similar data collection and analyses in a non-treated chronic pain sample may be informative.