Chronic pain and premature mortality in men and women, using data from UK Biobank

Muralidharan et al. (1) demonstrated that 4 months after nerve injury, male (but not female) mice demonstrated telomere length reduction and p53-mediated cellular senescence in the spinal cord, which was associated with pain chronicity and a decreased lifespan. They analyzed data from UK Biobank and concluded that their sex-specific observations in mice of a decreased lifespan were replicated in humans. The basis of this conclusion was a finding that among men in UK Biobank, a larger number of pain sites reported at recruitment associated with an earlier age at death (slope –0.19, P = 0.00011), while among women, the relationship between pain sites and death was much weaker and not statistically significant (slope –0.039, P = 0.51). We believe that the method of analysis was inappropriate, and the authors have come to an incorrect conclusion on this specific point.