Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Chronic pain is very common, with 1 in 5 people reporting chronic pain in Canada. We estimated the one-year per-person costs to the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care for people who have chronic pain. We did this by looking at healthcare administrative data for people who answered the Canadian Community Health Survey in 2000-01, 2007-08 and 2009-10 and said they had chronic pain. We matched each person to someone who said s/he did not have chronic pain in the same survey but who had similar other health conditions. We followed them for one year after the survey and added all their health costs. We obtained the extra (incremental) cost to manage chronic pain by subtracted the costs of each person who did not have chronic pain from the costs of the matched person with chronic pain and taking the average of all pairs. We had 19,138 pairs of people in our study. Survey respondents were aged 12 years and up (average age 55 years) The average annual incremental cost for managing chronic pain was $1,742 per person, 51% more than the people without chronic pain. The largest contributor to the incremental cost was hospitalization ($514).