Chronic pain may impair your memory

Chronic pain doesn’t just cause physical discomfor, it can also impair your memory. Researchers at the University of Alberta’s Multidisciplinary Pain Centre in Edmonton studied 24 patients with chronic pain and found that two-thirds of them showed significant disruption of attention and memory when tested.

The findings of the study published in the latest issue of journal Anaesthesia and Analgesia suggest that pain may disrupt the maintenance of the memory that is required to hold information for processing and retain it for storage in longer-term memory stores. Participants in the study – all of whom had pain lasting six months or longer – were given computerised tests of working memory and a neuropsychological test of attention on ‘pain’ and ‘less pain’ days.

On the ‘less pain’ day, participants were tested after receiving a painreducing procedure as part of their ongoing treatment at the Centre. On the ‘pain’ day, participants were tested without having received a pain-reducing procedure, when their pain was reported to be at a high level. Sixteen participants – a startling 67 per cent – showed clinical impairment due to pain

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