The Moderating Effect of Cognitive Aging on the Associations between Pain Report, Executive Function and the Prefrontal Cortex
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2018-07-01
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en
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Pain prevalence is increasing with age. Pain is often assessed with self-report questionnaires. Executive function (EF) is crucial in using pain questionnaires and EF is known to decrease with aging. In younger adults, better EF performance is associated with less reported pain, whereas in older adults, better EF performance is associated with more reported pain. One potential explanation for this reversed association between EF and pain report, may be a decrease of the common underlying substrate of EF and pain, the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The goal of the present study was to investigate whether age moderated the expected associations between EF and pain report and between PFC volume and pain report. Forty healthy participants between 20 and 80 years of age were included. EF was assessed by the Trail Making Test (TMT), the Stroop, and the Digit Span Backward. Pain was assessed by the Numeric Rating Scale. No significant associations were found in the moderation models. However, reported pain was negatively associated with the TMT-B ratio score, indicating that more reported pain was related to a decrease in TMT performance. Furthermore, reported pain was positively associated with intracranial volume, so that more reported pain was associated with larger intracranial volume. This association suggests that other brain areas besides the PFC might be important in reporting pain, which is an important angle for future studies.
Key words: pain report, aging, executive function, prefrontal cortex, Trail Making Test, intracranial volume.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen