Friends in pain: pain tolerance in a social network

摘要

In this issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Pain, Engebret-sen and colleagues [1] report on the association between friendship and pain tolerance. This work is notable in a number of respects. First, it adds to a small but rapidly growing literature on social factors and pain [2-5]. As one of the three pillars of the biopsychosocial model of pain [6], social modulation of pain has received far less empirical attention than biology and psychology, despite the known importance of social factors as risk factors for chronic pain development and in predicting outcomes. Second, the current effort represents the first in-depth social network analysis of pain, an intriguing methodology that has been successfully applied to traits including loneliness, obesity, smoking, and alcohol consumption [7]. Third, it features an extremely large sample size of phe-noryped individuals - 997 adolescents living in Troms0, Norway - with a participation rate of 93%. And finally, its methods section features some of the most complex algebraic equations ever to appear in a journal with the word "pain" in its title.