An official website of the United States government
QuickStats: Percentage* of Adults Aged ≥20 Years Who Had Chronic Pain,† by Veteran Status and Age Group — National Health Interview Survey, United States, 2019§
Weekly / November 27, 2020 / 69(47);1797
* With 95% confidence intervals shown with error bars.
† Based on the response to a survey question that asked “In the past 3 months, how often did you have pain? Would you say never, some days, most days, or every day?” Chronic pain was defined as pain on most days or every day in the past 3 months.
§ Estimates are based on household interviews of a sample of the civilian, noninstitutionalized U.S. population and are derived from the National Health Interview Survey Sample Adult component.
During 2019, military veterans aged ≥20 years were more likely to have chronic pain than were nonveterans (31.5% versus 20.1%). By age group, the likelihood of having chronic pain was higher among veterans than nonveterans for those aged 20–34 years (27.1% versus 9.4%), 35–49 years (27.7% versus 17.7%), and 50–64 years (37.2% versus 26.3%). Among those aged ≥65 years, prevalence of chronic pain did not differ significantly by veteran status (30.8% among veterans versus 31.0% among nonveterans). Among nonveterans, the prevalence of chronic pain increased with age. Among veterans, those aged 50–64 years had the highest prevalence of chronic pain.
Source: National Health Interview Survey, 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis.htm.
Reported by: Carla Zelaya, PhD, vdn3@cdc.gov, 301-458-4164; James M. Dahlhamer, PhD; Yu Sun, PhD.
Suggested citation for this article: QuickStats: Percentage of Adults Aged ≥20 Years Who Had Chronic Pain, by Veteran Status and Age Group — National Health Interview Survey, United States, 2019. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2020;69:1797. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6947a6.
For more information on this topic, CDC recommends the following link: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/prescribing/guideline.html.
MMWR and Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report are service marks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Use of trade names and commercial sources is for identification only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services.
References to non-CDC sites on the Internet are
provided as a service to MMWR readers and do not constitute or imply
endorsement of these organizations or their programs by CDC or the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services. CDC is not responsible for the content
of pages found at these sites. URL addresses listed in MMWR were current as of
the date of publication.
All HTML versions of MMWR articles are generated from final proofs through an automated process. This conversion might result in character translation or format errors in the HTML version. Users are referred to the electronic PDF version (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr) and/or the original MMWR paper copy for printable versions of official text, figures, and tables.
Questions or messages regarding errors in formatting should be addressed to mmwrq@cdc.gov.