Associations Between Pain Reactivity to Worse Sleep and Health Outcomes

TL;DR

The paper explores how pain increases after poor sleep and links this to worse mental health outcomes in adults.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel approach to analyzing how individual pain reactivity to sleep disturbances relates to psychological distress.

Findings

Higher pain location reactivity to poor sleep quality correlates with increased psychological distress.

Pain severity reactivity to poor sleep quality is linked to concurrent distress but not long-term distress changes.

Pain reactivity to poor sleep is not associated with changes in chronic condition counts.

Abstract

Sleep and pain are co-occurring issues in adulthood. Pain reactivity to worse sleep refers to person-specific changes in daily pain following nights of shorter-than-usual sleep duration or poorer-than-usual sleep quality. We examined the cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of sleep-related pain reactivity with psychological distress and the number of chronic conditions.

Data were obtained from the Work, Family, and Health Study, which collected data from healthcare and information technology workers (n = 311; Mage=41.38 years), who completed 8-days of daily diary. We controlled for sociodemographic and health covariates in a series of multilevel structural equation models and growth curve models in Mplus. Sensitivity analyses adjusted for sleep and pain medications and stratified analyses by age.

Those who reported more pain locations and severity following poorer-than-usual sleep quality had more concurrent distress (higher pain location reactivity to worse sleep quality: B = 1.03, p<.001; higher pain severity reactivity to worse sleep quality: B = 0.56, p=.001). In the growth curve models, higher pain location reactivity to poorer sleep quality was associated with higher concurrent distress (Path Est.=1.67, p=.023) and decreases in distress over time (Path Est.=-0.74, p=.032). Higher pain severity reactivity to poorer sleep quality was associated with higher concurrent distress (Path Est.=0.62, p=.030) but not changes in distress over time. Pain reactivity to worse sleep was not associated with concurrent or change in the number of chronic conditions.

Future directions are to examine the influence of pain reactivity to worse sleep in larger and more diverse samples across longer follow-up periods.