Chronic pain in older people: focus on sarcopenia

Abstract

Chronic pain among the elderly aged 60 years and above is one of the «big» geriatric syndromes, and has great prognostic significance in relation to cognitive, functional and physical status.The loss of muscle strength, mass (sarcopenia) is one of the important components of chronic pain syndromes in elderly patients. Pathological findings were demonstrated by own observation of 116 patients in the geriatric unit aged 75,667.98 years (110 women, 94.8%). Most patients had a combination of several geriatric syndromes, an average of which accounted for 6.6. Among them, there were falls - 72 (62.1%), chronic pain - 85 (73.3%), senile asthenia - 51 (43.9%), etc. In most cases, chronic pain was due to osteoarthritis. According to the dynamometry data, a decrease in muscle strength was found in 45.9% of cases, without chronic pain syndrome in 9.7% of cases among patients with chronic pain syndrome. Thus, prevalence rates of decreased muscle strength were higher in patients with chronic pain, than in patients without pain. In addition, a significantly lower walking speed was found, which indicates a poor prognosis in patients of older age groups.Sarcopenia and chronic pain treatment programs for elderly patients contain a number of evidence points: therapeutic exercises, adequate intake of calories and protein, vitamin D3, reduction of the number of drugs, chondroitin sulfate (Chondrogard), glucosamine sulfate (Sustagard Artro). This program, being multicomponent, should be long and regular.

Keywords

• pain
• chronic pain
• geriatric syndrome
• dinopenia
• sarcopenia
• physical functioning of patients
• osteoarthritis
• back pain
• musculoskeletal diseases
• chondroitin sulphate (chondroguard®)
• glucosamine sulphate (sustaguard® artro)