More activity, less sitting tied to better pain modulation in seniors

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older adults who are more physically active may have an easier time modulating their pain response, thus reducing their risk of developing chronic pain, new findings suggest.

Doing more moderate to vigorous physical activity was associated with less pain facilitation, while people who were less sedentary and did more light physical activity had better pain inhibitory function, Dr. Kelly Naugle of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and her colleagues report in the March issue of Pain.

“As people age, the ability to endogenously modulate pain decreases,” Dr. Naugle told Reuters Heatlh in a telephone interview. But the findings show that moderate to vigorous activity, as well as simply sitting less and doing light activities instead, may help counteract the effect of aging on pain modulation, she added.

Being more active is associated with better pain modulatory function, Dr. Naugle and her team note. The decline in physical activity that often accompanies aging may contribute to older adults’ worse endogenous pain modulation, they add. The researchers recently found a link between self-reported physical activity and pain modulation measured by the conditioned pain modulation (CPM) test and pain facilitation on the temporal summation (TS) test.

In the new study, Dr. Naugle and her colleagues used accelerometers to objectively measure physical activity in 51 older adults for seven days. Study participants also completed the CPM and TS tests.

Spending more time in moderate to vigorous physical activity was associated with less TS of pain due to heat, suggesting less central sensitization, the researchers found. People who were more sedentary had worse endogenous pain inhibition as measured by the CPM test, while light activity was associated with better pain inhibition.

The next step in the research will be to test exercise interventions to improve pain modulation, Dr. Naugle said. She and her colleagues are currently testing an intervention to reduce sedentary behavior and replace it with light physical activity in patients with fibromyalgia to determine if this reduces pain.

“Lots of studies look at ‘let’s get people exercising and see what happens,’ but not many have looked at ‘what if we actually get them to sit less, what happens then,’” the researcher said. “You can have somebody who exercises regularly, which is still obviously very important, but if they’re sitting for the rest of the day for 10 hours at work that still may have negative effects.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2l8NJge

Pain 2017.

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