As our world becomes increasingly digital, our healthcare services will adapt and take advantage of the new opportunties this opens up. At the same time, our patients will continue to expect human contact. With the average increase in life expectancy, as well as new treatments being available to cure or control different diseases, comorbidities are becoming more and more prevalent in most chronic diseases. As we are well aware, stress, insomnia, and depression are all comorbidities relevant to pain. Taking into account these issues, the theme for the #EFIC2022 Congress in Dublin, Ireland is “Targeting pain and its comorbidities in the Digital Age“.
One significant comorbidity is depression.
Chronic pain and depression are estimated to have a 30-60% comorbidity rate. A large body of evidence suggests that chronic pain and depression do more than co-occur, they also promote the development of each other and negatively impact the treatment success of each health complaint. We urgently need
- Better tools for pain and mental health clinicians to diagnose and predict the development of co-morbid depression and chronic pain, and
- Effective preventive and curative interventions.
Unfortunately, the current available treatments for depression and chronic pain only have modest effects.
These presentations will focus on the link between depression and pain at #EFIC2022:
| Title | Speaker | Time |
| Wednesday 27 April 2022 | ||
| Trigeminal neuropathic pain and depression | Satu Jääkeläinen (Finland) |
10.55 – 11.20 (25 mins) |
| Saturday, 30 April 2022 | ||
| Depression and pain: Understanding the basic mechanisms of this comorbidity | Ipek Yalcin (France) | 08.30 – 08.50 (20 mins) |
| Depression and pain: Understanding the comorbidity in a patient with pain | Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg (Germany) |
08.50 – 09.10 (20 mins) |
| Treating the comorbidity of pain and depression: Pharmacology and TMS | Ulrich Hegerl (Germany) |
09.10 – 09.30 (20 mins) |
| Treating the comorbidity of pain and depression: Emotion-focused exposure | Katja Boersma (Sweden) |
09.30 – 09.50 (20 mins) |
| Do the results of experimental studies contradict the clinical findings in depression? | Stefan Lautenbacher (Germany) |
11.35 – 12.00 (25 mins) |
