One in four Americans have daily pain

CHICAGO (Reuters) - More than a quarter of Americans have daily pain, a problem that costs the country more than $16 billion a year in pain remedies and about $60 billion a year in lost productivity, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

Their random survey of U.S. citizens found pain was fairly evenly divided between men and women, but poorer Americans reported being in more pain than wealthier people.

"Those with lower income or less education spent a higher proportion of time in pain and reported higher average pain than did those with higher income or more education," Dr. Arthur Stone of Stony Brook University in New York and colleagues wrote in the journal Lancet.

Stone and Dr. Alan Krueger of Princeton University based their findings on a telephone survey of nearly 4,000 U.S. citizens. People in the survey provided pain ratings for three randomly selected periods during the day. They also gave information about what they were doing during those times.

The data were adjusted by the Gallup Organization to represent the entire U.S. population.

What they showed is that 29 percent of men and 27 percent of women reported feeling some pain during the sample times. People with lower income or less education spent more of their time in pain, and reported more severe pain.

The average pain rating increased with age. But it seemed to plateau between the ages of 45 and 75, before rising again.

People in households with yearly income of less than $30,000 reported twice the pain rating as people in households with incomes of more than $100,000, the researchers found.

And survey respondents with less than a high-school education had double the average pain rating as college graduates.