In a new study from the University of Georgia, researchers found that financial stress not only can have an immediate impact on well-being but can lead to physical pain nearly 30 years later.
They that family financial stress in midlife is linked to a depleted sense of control, which is related to increased physical pain in later years.
Physical pain is considered an illness on its own with three major components: biological, psychological and social.
In older adults, it co-occurs with other health problems like limited physical functioning, loneliness and heart disease.
Most pain research is neurological, but it’s important to also connect it to stressful family experiences, according to the researchers.
In the study, the team used data from the Iowa Youth and Family Project, a longitudinal study that provides 27 years of data on rural families from a cluster of eight counties in north-central Iowa.
The data was collected in real-time from husbands and wives in 500 families who experienced financial problems associated with the late 1980s farm crisis.
Most of the individuals are now over 65 years old, and the couples are in enduring marriages—some as long as 45 years.
The team found a connection between family financial hardship in the early 1990s and physical pain nearly three decades later.
Additional findings from their study show it’s more likely that financial strain influences physical pain, though physical pain can in turn influence financial strain through additional health care costs.
The research suggests that stressful experiences like financial strain erode psychological resources like a sense of control.
This depletion of resources activates brain regions that are sensitive to stress, launching pathological, physiological and neurological processes that lead to health conditions like physical pain, physical limitations, loneliness and heart disease.
If you care about pain management, please read studies about most people using cannabis for pain relief have multiple withdrawal symptoms and findings of this common painkiller may help treat deadliest infectious disease.
For more information about pain treatment and prevention, please see recent studies about this pain killer may increase your hip fracture risk and results showing that statins: How cholesterol-lowering drugs cause muscle pain.
The study is published in Stress & Health. One author of the study is Kandauda A.S. Wickrama.
Copyright © 2021 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
