Using Secondary Analyses to Test Novel Pathways Linking Family Stress and Pain Incidence and Persistence Among African Americans

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT DESCRIPTION: Chronic pain is a persistent source of disability and reduced quality of life for aging adults – outcomes that are disproportionately worse for aging African Americans, who report greater pain severity and worse pain-related disability compared to White peers. Among risk factors for pain, chronic stress is an especially potent pain precipitant, an effect made far worse for African Americans due to structural inequities. The same is true for family stress, which is exacerbated by these same inequities, yet it is infrequently examined as part of the stress-pain pathway. Family support is also ignored in pain research, despite the unique importance of family for African Americans, who identify family support as critical for pain self- management. Pain research must understand how family stress and support convey risk or resilience for chronic pain, as well as how family-pain pathways are influenced by structural inequities, in order to support the development of innovative pain management interventions. We propose to analyze existing data from African American participants in two well-established, representative projects on aging health, Midlife in the U.S. (MIDUS; N = 721) and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS; N = 2,698), to study how pain conditions develop and persist for aging African Americans. The 10-year waves of MIDUS provide the advantage of specific pain interference measures and physician-provided pain diagnoses; the biennial waves of HRS (2006- 2020) support testing temporal mediation and examining the timing of pain trajectories. We aim to (a) identify the specific characteristics of family emotional climate (i.e., support and stress in both marital and non-marital family relationships) that operate as risk or resilience factors for pain outcomes (i.e., pain development, persistence, interference, and severity), and (b) determine how family emotional climate influences pain pathogenesis via biobehavioral reactivity pathways (i.e., depression and anxiety symptoms, and inflammation). We propose a multidimensional conceptualization of structural inequity to explore the moderating effects of discrimination, socioeconomic disparity, and neighborhood disadvantage using Census tract-level data. The unique role of family stress and support for African Americans – an understudied population with a unique and important emphasis on family, kinship networks, and communal healing – is unknown. Our research will close this gap to establish how structural factors underlying pain disparities potentiate family-biobehavioral reactivity pain mechanisms. Findings can inform precision health and the identification of unique chronic pain signatures that account for both bio- and psychosocial factors. Our work will lay the groundwork for immediate translation to culturally-responsive family-based pain self-management interventions for aging African Americans.