Adolescent chronic pain costs $19.5 billion a year in United States

Chronic pain affects about 5 percent of children and adolescents. They seek more medical care, use more medication, miss more school, and report worse quality of life than their peers without pain. Before this paper was published, little was known about the costs of chronic pain in childhood and adolescence. Researchers from the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Research Institute, therefore, sought to better understand the economic costs to society due to adolescent chronic pain. Study participants were 149 adolescents treated at interdisciplinary pain clinics.

Parents of study subjects completed validated measures of family economic attributes and reports on family health services use and productivity losses for 12 months due to a child’s chronic pain.

Results showed that the mean annual cost associated with chronic pain per participant was $11,787 and median cost was $6,770. Further, the costs tended to be concentrated in a small subset of the children. The top five percent of patients incurring the highest costs accounted for 30 percent of the total costs. The lower 75 percent of participants accounted for just 34 percent of the costs. Total costs for adolescents with moderate to severe chronic pain were extrapolated to $19.5 billion a year in the United States.

The authors concluded that future research should investigate the efficacy of a full range of less intensive outpatient interdisciplinary pain management interventions for adolescents with chronic pain, as well as Internet and mobile-based therapies.