Chronic Pain in the European Elderly Population

Chronic pain has an important impact on peoples’ lives and is a fundamental dimension of wellbeing. At the individual level, it is associated with a series of negative outcomes including depression, job loss, reduced quality of life, and impairment of function. At the societal level, it imposes considerable costs on the health care system and the economy. In this paper, I exploit newly available information collected in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to study the prevalence of chronic pain in the elderly population across Europe and investigate the extent to which chronic pain is associated with education and social exclusion.