Chronic pain and the development of cardiovascular disease

The overall hypothesis of this proposal is that chronic pain is a clinically relevant contributor to the development of cardiovascular disease in the community.

Importantly, previous studies reporting associations between chronic pain and cardiovascular disease have been limited by small study samples, cross-sectional study design, lack of data on specific cardiovascular events and risk factors, limited data on pain severity and psychosocial factors, risk of reverse causation, and lack of sex-specific analyses.Therefore, we aim to comprehensively investigate the detrimental interplay between chronic pain and cardiovascular disease using multiple large epidemiological study cohorts and cohorts with real world clinical data (total n>1 000 000).

The different study samples have detailed data on pain phenotypes, psychosocial factors, treatments, co-morbidities and incidence of cardiovascular disease and mortality, but also large-scale data on metabolomics and proteomics which can provide additional insights to underlying mechanisms.

If successful, we expect that our findings will lead to important new insights of the interplay between chronic pain and cardiovascular disease that may have implications for the routine care of chronic pain patients in primary care.

We hope to establish that patients with chronic pain in primary care are at substantially increased cardiovascular risk and would benefit from an intensified preventive treatment.