(Press-News.org) Financial stress can have an immediate impact on well-being, but can it lead to physical pain nearly 30 years later? The answer is yes, according to new research from University of Georgia scientists.
The study, published in Stress & Health, reveals that family financial stress in midlife is associated with a depleted sense of control, which is related to increased physical pain in later years.
"Physical pain is considered an illness on its own with three major components: biological, psychological and social," said Kandauda A.S. Wickrama, first author and professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. "In older adults, it co-occurs with other health problems like limited physical functioning, loneliness and cardiovascular disease."
Most pain research is neurological, but it's important to also connect it to stressful family experiences, according to the researchers.
"Dr. Wickrama and I are both interested in the context surrounding families and how that context impacts the relational, physical and mental health of the individuals in the family," said lead author Catherine Walker O'Neal, associate research scientist in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. "Finances are an important component of our work because it's such a relevant contextual stressor families face."
The authors used data from the Iowa Youth and Family Project, a longitudinal study that provides 27 years of data on rural families from a cluster of eight counties in north-central Iowa. The data was collected in real time from husbands and wives in 500 families who experienced financial problems associated with the late 1980s farm crisis. Most of the individuals are now over 65 years old, and the couples are in enduring marriages--some as long as 45 years.
Even after the researchers controlled for concurrent physical illnesses, family income and age, they found a connection between family financial hardship in the early 1990s and physical pain nearly three decades later. Additional findings from their study show it's more likely that financial strain influences physical pain, though physical pain can in turn influence financial strain through additional health care costs.
Physical pain is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, according to Wickrama. The research suggests that stressful experiences like financial strain erode psychological resources like a sense of control. This depletion of resources activates brain regions that are sensitive to stress, launching pathological, physiological and neurological processes that lead to health conditions like physical pain, physical limitations, loneliness and cardiovascular disease.
"In their later years, many complain about memory loss, bodily pain and lack of social connections," he said. "Nearly two-thirds of adults complain of some type of bodily pain, and nearly that many complain of loneliness. That percentage is going up, and the health cost for that is going up. That is a public health concern."
INFORMATION:
Eric T. Klopack, who recently graduated from UGA and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at University of Southern California, is also co-author on this paper.
Florida State University researchers have discovered a novel way to improve the performance of electrical wires used as high-temperature superconductors (HTS), findings that have the potential to power a new generation of particle accelerators.
An image of Bi-2212, bismuth-based superconducting wires. (Mark Wallheiser/FAMU-FSU College of Engineering)
Researchers used high-resolution scanning electron microscopy to understand how processing methods influence grains in bismuth-based superconducting wires (known as Bi-2212). Those grains form the underlying ...
Amyloid fibrils are deposits of proteins in the body that join together to form microscopic fibres. Their formation has been linked to many serious human diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Type 2 diabetes.
Until today, scientists have been unable to reliably measure the speed of fibril growth, as there have been no tools that could directly measure growth rate in solution. However, researchers from the UK's University of Bath and the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source have now invented a technique that does just that. Results from their study are published in RSC Chemical Biology.
"This is an important breakthrough, ...
In a newly released study, researchers found that remote and virtual care models can negatively impact small physician offices. Three researchers from END ...
To better understand the psychological and physical impact caused by the profound consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic - and also inform priorities for interventions and policy changes to address the mental health consequences of the pandemic -- researchers from the Center for the Developing Brain at the Child Mind Institute developed and deployed the CoRonavIruS health and Impact Survey (CRISIS). This questionnaire covered key topics relating to mental distress and resilience during the pandemic. According to a newly-published manuscript of the findings, perceived risk of COVID-19, prior mental health status, and lifestyle changes were key predictors of mental health during the pandemic in adults and children surveyed in the U.S. and U.K.
In the study, supported by the Morgan Stanley ...
URBANA, Ill. - Agricultural producers deal firsthand with changing weather conditions, and extreme events such as drought or flooding can impact their productivity and profit. Climate change models project such events will occur more often in the future. But studies of the economic consequences of weather and climate on agriculture typically focus on local impacts only.
A new study from the University of Illinois looks at how changes in weather - including extreme events - may decrease crop profit in one state while increasing profits in other states. The secret ingredient: U.S. interstate trade. It is expected to mitigate ...
The field of ancient DNA has revealed important aspects of our evolutionary past, including our relationships with our distant cousins, Denisovans and Neandertals. These studies have relied on DNA from bones and teeth, which store DNA and protect it from the environment. But such skeletal remains are exceedingly rare, leaving large parts of human history inaccessible to genetic analysis.
To fill these gaps, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology developed new methods for enriching and analyzing human nuclear DNA from sediments, which are abundant at almost every archaeological site. Until now, only ...
The widespread proliferation of the internet and information and communication technologies (ICT) has drawn people into urban centres, according to new research.
Despite being able to access data at the drop of a hat or speak face-to-face to people on the other side of the world, the evolution of technological capabilities hasn't led to an exodus from cities. In fact experts at the University of Bristol have found quite the opposite; that the increased adoption of ICT has resulted in national urban systems - cities within a country - that are characterised by higher population concentrations. ...
A new generation of miniature recording probes can track the same neurons inside tiny mouse brains over weeks -- and even months.
The new tools build on the success of the original Neuropixels probes released in 2017 and currently used in more than 400 labs. Neuropixels 2.0 are much smaller -- about a third the size of their predecessors. They're designed to record the electrical activity from more individual neurons and have the unique ability to track this activity over extended time periods. That makes them especially useful for studying long-term phenomena like learning and memory in small animals such as mice, says Tim Harris, a senior fellow at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus who led the project. Harris and his colleagues describe the advance in a paper published online ...
Irvine, Calif., -- By analyzing gains and losses in the genes of phytoplankton samples collected in all major ocean regions, researchers at the University of California, Irvine have created the most nuanced and high-resolution map yet to show where these photosynthetic organisms either thrive or are forced to adapt to limited quantities of key nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron.
As part of the new Bio-GO-SHIP initiative, the UCI scientists made eight deployments on six different research vessels, spending 228 days at sea in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. They generated nearly 1,000 ocean metagenomes from 930 locations around the globe, with an average distance between collection points at 26.5 kilometers (about 16.5 miles). ...
University of California, Berkeley, chemists have discovered a way to simplify the removal of toxic metals. like mercury and boron. during desalination to produce clean water, while at the same time potentially capturing valuable metals, such as gold.
Desalination -- the removal of salt -- is only one step in the process of producing drinkable water, or water for agriculture or industry, from ocean or waste water. Either before or after the removal of salt, the water often has to be treated to remove boron, which is toxic to plants, and heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, which are toxic to humans. Often, the process leaves ...