1 in 3 Indians live in pain, reveals study. The agony is highest in these states

According to researchers, pain causes distress to people and imposes costs on households and on the economy, but it hasn’t drawn as much attention in public health practice or research in India as it should have. (Representative image)

India’s first country-wide pain-mapping exercise has discovered that one in three citizens, who are 45 or older, lives with pain.

The study, published in the research journal Pain, also found that the national average of pain prevalence in the country is 37 per cent in the 45+ age group, reported The Telegraph. About 15 per cent of people in this bracket are in pain for five or more days a week, the publication stated.

Health researchers also observed unexplained differences in pain prevalence among different states. West Bengal, Jharkhand, Puducherry, Odisha and Nagaland had the highest pain prevalence while Mizoram, Andhra Pradesh and Haryana had the lowest.

The exercise also revealed that proportion of people who curb their daily activities because they are in pain. It ranged from 2.6 per cent in Mizoram to 22 per cent in Kerala and about 40 per cent in West Bengal.

Sanjay Mohanty, professor at the International Institute of Population Studies (IIPS), Mumbai, and study leader, told The Telegraph, “Pain causes distress to people and imposes costs on households and on the economy, but it hasn’t drawn as much attention in public health practice or research in India as it should have."

With his collaborators from academic institutions in the Netherlands and Switzerland, Mohanty has now generated the first national and sub-national estimates of pain prevalence, pain-related limits on daily activities, and treatment levels.

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As per the exercise, about 73 per cent of people in pain were being treated. Among them, about 40 per cent received oral or injectable medications while another 40 per cent applied topical painkillers at the site of the pain. The rest used physiotherapy or psychotherapy for relief.

The study, however, did not probe the cause of the pain.

“There is at present little information about pain management costs or the costs resulting from pain mismanagement,” Mohanty said. “The causes, the costs, the impact on quality of life and households are subjects of future research."

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