On the moderating role of age in the relationship between pain and cognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: A relationship between pain perception and cognitive function is evident. However, the directionality of this association is unclear and may be influenced by age. That is, inverse associations between pain and cognition have been reported in young and middle-aged chronic pain patients, whereas higher clinical pain ratings have been associated with better cognitive performance in older chronic pain patients. Therefore, this study examined the possible moderating role of age in the pain-cognition relationship. METHOD: Twenty-two younger and 24 older chronic pain participants completed neuropsychological tests of psychomotor speed, memory and executive function. They also completed the McGill Pain Questionnaire to evaluate clinical pain. RESULTS: Interaction analyses revealed that age indeed moderates the relationship between clinical pain ratings and cognitive functions. In the younger age group, pain ratings were inversely related to memory and executive function. In the older age group, a positive relationship was found between pain ratings and executive function, whereas the inverse association of clinical pain with memory was no longer present. CONCLUSIONS: This study was the first to confirm the hypothesis that age is an important moderator of the relationship between pain and cognition. An important finding is that in older adults, most inverse effects of pain on cognition are either no longer present or may even be reversed. The positive relationship between pain and executive function may indicate age-related reduced integrity of a shared underlying neural substrate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".