Poor sleep may cause chronic pain

People who sleep poorly may be more likely to develop a chronic pain condition and have worse physical health, a study from the UK suggests.

A general decline in both the quantity and quality of hours slept led to a two to three-fold increase in pain problems over time, researchers found.

“Sleep and pain problems are two of the biggest health issues today,” said lead study author Esther Afolalu of the University of Warwick in Coventry. Pain is known to interfere with sleep, she said. But the new study shows “that the impact of sleep on pain is often bigger than (the impact of) pain on sleep,” she added.

Sleep disturbances, she added, contribute to problems in the ability to process and cope with pain.

Afolalu and her colleagues reviewed 16 studies involving more than 60,000 adults from 10 countries. The studies looked at how well people were sleeping at the start, and then evaluated the effects of long-term sleep changes on pain, immune function and physical health. Half the participants were tracked for at least four and a half years.

Overall, sleep reductions led to impaired responses to bacteria, viruses and other foreign substances, more inflammation, higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol and other biomarkers related to pain, fatigue and poor health. Newly developed insomnia doubled the risk of a chronic pain disorder and hip fracture problems, the study authors wrote in the journal Sleep Medicine.

Deterioration in sleep was also associated with worse self-reported physical functioning. At the same time, researchers didn’t find links between increased sleep and less pain or arthritis, although they did find that improvement in sleep was associated with better physical functioning.