Childhood abuse and the experience of pain in adulthood: the mediating effects of PTSD and emotion dysregulation on pain levels and pain-related functional impairment
Abstract
Previous findings suggest a relationship between childhood abuse and pain-related conditions. It is yet to be determined whether adult posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms may mediate the association between the experience of childhood abuse and reported pain in adulthood. We sought to determine if emotion dysregulation may also play a role in mediating PTSD and pain levels. We examined subjects (N = 814) recruited from the primary care clinics of an urban public hospital as part of an National Institute of Mental Health-funded study of trauma-related risk and resilience. We evaluated childhood abuse with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, PTSD symptoms with the PTSD Symptom Severity scale, and emotional dysregulation with the Emotion Dysregulation Scale. Pain and functional limitations of pain were assessed through self-report. We found that both childhood abuse and current PTSD symptoms predicted higher levels of reported pain. Childhood abuse, PTSD symptoms, and emotion dysregulation all predicted higher levels of functional impairment related to pain. Using the Sobel method and bootstrapping techniques and controlling for current level of negative affect, we found that PTSD fully mediated the effect of childhood a...Continue Reading
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Complex PTSD symptoms mediate the association between childhood trauma and physical health problems.
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