BACKGROUND
Over the past few decades, the average human life expectancy has increased ever in the world. Many under-represented issues in the lives of older adults have been neglected due to the fact that they span multiple domains; pain is one of the issues.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study is to identify the types of pain changes that affect older Koreans 65 years and over, as well as their effects on depression.
METHODS
We analyzed the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLoSA) data collected from 2010 (3rd) to 2018 (7th). A data of total of 1,359 participants, aged 65 or older were used to estimate the change in pain. A latent growth model was performed to estimate the overall change in pain and Growth Mixture Modeling (GMM) was performed to categorize the types of pain changes. Lastly, multiple regression analysis was performed to examine the effect of pain change types on depression among older adults.
RESULTS
The pain changes of older adults were classified into two categories: 'low-stable' (87.9%, n=1,194), and 'high increasing' (12.1%, n=165). The depression showed a stronger relationship among the high-increasing type of pain than the low-stable type (B=.844, p<.001). Upon examining the differences in demographic characteristics by type, the high-increasing type had a higher percentage of women, lower-income, relatively low educational attainment, and a higher percentage of rural residents than the low-stable type.
CONCLUSIONS
The significance of this study lies in the fact that it reiterated the importance of early pain diagnosis and intervention by identifying the types of pain changes in older adults and analyzing their effects on depression. Therefore, it is especially important to pay attention to interventions that are designed to help vulnerable groups with a high risk of pain obtain effective pain management.