Thoughts On Chronic Pain, Aging, Degeneration

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Some thoughts on whether and how chronic pain and the process of degenerative aging tie together from Randall Parker at FuturePundit:

Do the various pains have a common cause? Does chronic pain indicate a generally faster rate of aging?
I'd like to see a follow-up of this study with people over the age of 50 where stem cells get extracted from knees and other regions of pain and also from the blood. The goal would be to measure telomere lengths and compare them between people with and without pain to see if people with more pain are biologically older than age equivalent people who suffer less pain. Telomeres are caps on the ends of chromosomes and their lengths provide an indication of how many times a cell has divided. The more times a cell divides the shorter the telomeres get. I bet that the people with more chronic pains have shorter telomere lengths. Also, I bet that people with shorter telomere lengths will have lower life expectancies on average.

A study that looks for correlations between stem cell age and extent of aches and pains would provide evidence for whether development of stem cell treatments should gain priority in treatment of arthritis and other diseases that cause pain with age. Advocates for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) such as Aubrey de Grey argue that it would be more productive to develop rejuvenation therapies than to try to develop treatments for every disease of old age. If aches and pains are the result of cellular aging and of a lack of young stem cells to supply replacements for repair then more rapid development of rejuvenating stem cell therapies would provide better solutions for the pains of old age than surgery, anti-inflammatory drugs, anti-pain medication, and other current approaches.

From an engineering, reliability theory point of view, it seems like a sensible proposition and certainly worthy of further investigation. Do older people who are suffering chronic pain have, on average, bodies that are more worn - more damaged - by the processes of aging?