Pain Experiences and Their Relation to Opioid Misuse Risk and Emotion Dysregulation

Abstract

Pain is a complex, multidimensional experience but often is measured as a unidimensional experience. This study aimed to separately assess the sensory and affective components of pain and identify their relations to important pain-related outcomes, particularly in terms of opioid misuse risk and emotion dysregulation among patients with chronic pain receiving treatment in Appalachia. Two hundred and twelve patients presenting to a multidisciplinary pain center completed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS-18), Screener and Opioid Assessment for Patients with Pain—Revised (SOAPP-R), and short-form McGill Pain Questionnaire (SF-MPQ). The sensory experience of pain was unrelated to emotion dysregulation (r = 0.06, p = 0.57 ) and weakly related to opioid misuse risk (r = 0.182, p < 0.05 ). In contrast, the affective experience of pain was moderately related to emotion dysregulation (r = 0.217, p < 0.05 ) and strongly related to opioid misuse risk (r = 0.37, p < 0.01 ). In addition, emotion dysregulation predicted variance in opioid misuse risk above and beyond the affective and sensory experiences of pain ((b = 0.693, p < 0.001 ). The results suggest patients with a strong affective experience versus sensory experience of pain and challenges with emotion regulation may require a more comprehensive intervention to address these underlying components in order to reduce their risk of misusing opioid medications.

Psychiatric Comorbidity and Emotional Dysregulation in Chronic Tension-Type Headache: A Case-Control Study

“…CTTH patients usually do symptomatic management of their symptoms with frequent consumption of psychoactive drugs due to anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric comorbidities, as well as chronic overuse of analgesics for pain [ 47 , 48 ] without approaching a global or multimodal physiopathological spectrum of the disease; this generates a pharmacological dependence that influences the chronification and poor control of their symptoms [ 49 ]. The use or overuse of psychoactive drugs and analgesics can alter affective states acutely during intake, during withdrawal, or as a result of chronic use [ 50 , 51 ].…”