Trailer – Airing Pain 149: Why pain persists: from childhood trauma to faulty immunity
First broadcast 16th May 2025
Shafiq Sikander, a professor of sensory neurophysiology at the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University, London.
Gareth Hathway, professor of neuroscience at the University of Nottingham’s’ school of life sciences.
Kathleen Sluka, a professor in physical therapy and rehabilitation science at the University of Iowa in the United States.
Transcript made with thanks to the British Pain Society Annual Scientific Conference in 2024.
Transcript begins
Paul Evans: How does acute short-term pain turn into chronic, persistent pain?
Kathleen Sluka: We know that in people with psychological trauma that young ages are more likely to have chronic pain later in life. But what we think is happening – and we’ve done a little bit of this – psychological trauma or some kind of a stressful event, it actually changes your immune system.
Evans: Why do early life experiences affect later life pain?
Shafiq Skikander: A lot of patients with fibromyalgia may have had early life stressors. Or they may often, when they come to clinic presenting with fibromyalgia, they usually have history of depression.
Evans: And do existing tools for measuring pain fall short?
Gareth Hathway: Slowly but surely, our understanding of the basic mechanisms is light years ahead of where it was. And clinically, an appreciation that babies do feel pain, young people do feel pain. It has a long-term consequence. So we can’t just treat them as small adults. We need a specialist approach to managing pain at every part of the life course. We need to think about how we measure that pain and how we treat that pain.
Evans: Find out more in Pain Concern’s April edition of Airing Pain.
End
Transcribed by Alisa Anokhina
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