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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Apr 1.
Published in final edited form as: Pain. 2017 Apr;158(Suppl 1):S11–S18. doi: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000000775

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Patterns of pain prevalence across the adult lifespan. The top panel shows that prevalence increases monotonically with age for several pain conditions, including joint pain, lower extremity pain, and neuropathic pains. The middle panel shows that for general chronic pain, prevalence seems to increase until middle age, at which time it plateaus. The bottom panel shows a pattern of increasing prevalence until middle age followed by a decrease in prevalence in later life for several conditions, including headache, abdominal pain, back pain, chest pain. References supporting these patterns can be found in [32]. It is important to recognize that these prevalence patterns are based on cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data; therefore, one cannot deduce pain trajectories within people from these data.