Prevalence of Pain Diagnoses and Burden of Pain Among Active Duty Soldiers, FY2012

doi:10.1093/milmed/usx200

Table II.

Reported Pain Level by Types of Primary Pain Diagnoses, Army Active Duty Soldiers (Non-Deployed), FY2012

	Soldiers with a Primary Pain Diagnosis (N = 175,753)
		Highest Pain Level for Primary Diagnosis^a,b,c
	Total	No/Mild (0, 1–3)		Moderate (4–6)		Severe (7–10)^d		Missing/ Not Reported
	N	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
Any primary pain diagnosis	175,173	33,478	19.0	49,505	28.2	46,787	26.6	45,983	26.2

Pain categories^e

Peripheral/CNS	5,889	991	16.8	1,811	30.8	2,224	37.8	863	14.7

Osteoarthritis	7,661	1,252	16.3	2,445	31.9	2,674	34.9	1,290	16.8

Back and neck pain (any type)	66,407	9,209	13.9	20,521	30.9	24,691	37.2	11,986	18.0

Headache/migraine	21,152	3,318	15.7	5,725	27.1	8,985	42.5	3,124	14.8

Non-traumatic joint disorders	83,614	16,189	19.4	26,071	31.2	24,699	29.5	16,655	19.9

Other musculoskeletal	87,759	15,230	17.4	26,590	30.3	27,349	31.2	18,590	21.2

Visceral/pelvic	22,259	3,748	16.8	5,918	26.6	7,682	34.5	4,911	22.1

Wounds/injury/fracture	23,926	4,360	18.2	6,264	26.2	6,764	28.3	6,538	27.3

Chronic non-specific	7,634	627	8.2	2,200	28.8	4,155	54.4	652	8.5

Subsample of 297,120 Army active duty soldiers (non-deployed), continuously enrolled in TRICARE in FY2012

^aPain level ratings are on a 0–10 scale: 0 = no pain, 1–3 = mild, 4–6 = moderate 7–10 = severe.

^bHighest pain level among all encounters (by soldier) with primary diagnosis for each pain category.

^cPain level was only captured during encounters in the military’s direct care setting, and therefore was coded as missing for the 16.3% of outpatient encounters that were in purchased care settings.

^dT-tests with Levene’s test to determine equality of variances and Bonferroni’s correction to adjust for multiple comparisons were utilized to test for associations of severe pain between types of pain categories. All pairwise tests were significant at p < 0.05, with the exception of peripheral/CNS-back/neck (p = ns) and visceral/pelvic-osteoarthritis (p = ns).

^eCategories are not mutually exclusive.