The Role of Pain and Socioenvironmental Factors on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms in Traumatically Injured Adults: A 1-year Prospective Study

Approximately 20% of individuals who experience a traumatic injury will subsequently develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Physical pain following traumatic injury has received increasing attention as both a distinct, functionally debilitating disorder and a comorbid symptom related to PTSD. Studies have demonstrated that both clinician-assessed injury severity and patient pain ratings can be important predictors of nonremitting PTSD; however, few have examined pain and PTSD alongside socioenvironmental factors. We postulated that both area- and individual-level socioeconomic circumstances and lifetime trauma history would be uniquely associated with PTSD symptoms and interact with the pain-PTSD association. To test these effects, pain and PTSD symptoms were assessed at four visits across a 1-year period in a sample of 219 traumatically injured participants recruited from a Level 1 trauma center. We used a hierarchal linear modeling approach to evaluate whether (a) patient-reported pain ratings were a better predictor of PTSD than clinician-assessed injury severity scores and (b) socioenvironmental factors, specifically neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage, individual income, and lifetime trauma history, influenced the pain-PTSD association. Results demonstrated associations between patient-reported pain ratings, but not clinician-assessed injury severity scores, and PTSD symptoms, R = .65. There was a significant interaction between neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and pain such that higher disadvantage decreased the strength of the pain-PTSD association but only among White participants, R = .69. Future directions include testing this question in a larger, more diverse sample of trauma survivors (e.g., geographically diverse) and examining factors that may alleviate both pain and PTSD symptoms.