Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. E-mail: sushmithadev. For commercial re-use, please contact journals. To determine whether socio-demographic factors are associated with heterogeneity in pain evolution in inflammatory rheumatic diseases IRDs after accounting for disease-specific characteristics in a system with universal health care.
Linear mixed models were used to characterize differences in pain evolution as a function of age tertiles , sex, ethnicity, education, marital, and professional status, after accounting for disease-related, treatment, lifestyle, and health factors.
Early identification of at-risk populations and implementation of multidisciplinary strategies may reduce patient-reported health outcome disparities. Keywords: pain evolution, rheumatoid arthritis, spondyloarthritis, socio-demographic factors, pain outcome. Pain mechanisms in inflammatory rheumatic diseases IRDs are multifactorial and are broadly classified as inflammatory related to disease pathophysiology and non-inflammatory attributed to dysregulation of peripheral and central pain-conducting pathways [ 1 , 2 ].
The pattern of pain evolution in IRDs is characterized by prominently decreasing pain in the early phases, probably due to early diagnosis and treatment, followed by pain plateauing in the ensuing years [ 3 , 4 ] at a level higher than the population average [ 5 , 6 ]. Emerging findings suggest that pain course is not uniform to all; unresolving pain probably linked to non-inflammatory mechanisms was observed among subgroups of those with IRDs, despite optimally controlled inflammation and universally accessible health-care advances [ 7 ].
Previous studies reporting associations between socio-demographic characteristics and pain in IRDs were based on cross-sectional [ 21 , 22 ] or longitudinal design that either did not account for non-linear evolution of pain in IRDs [ 11 ], were not based on repeatedly assessed pain measures [ 23 ], or were limited to patients with early [ 18 ] or long-standing disease [ 13 , 14 ].
