Obese people feel more pain

Obesity is known to be causing a host of other illness. Now, a new study has found that people carrying extra kilos experience more pain then those with normal weight.
The study of more than one million people, published in the journal Obesity, found the heaviest individuals also reported highest rates of pain — about 254 per cent more than the normal weight people in some cases.
“Our findings confirm and extend earlier studies about the link between obesity and pain,” study author Arthur Stone of Stony Brook University was quoted as saying by LiveScience.
Previous studies have also showed a link between weight and various painful conditions, including lower back pain, tension-type or migraine headache, fibromyalgia, abdominal pain and chronic widespread pain.
In the new study, Mr. Stone and his colleagues analysed data from telephone surveys conducted between 2008 and 2010 by the Gallup Organisation. Respondents indicated their height and weight, which researchers used to calculate body mass index (BMI), and also answered questions about pain, including whether they had “experienced pain much of the day yesterday.”
The participants were classified as normal weight if they have their BMI below 25; overweight (25 to below 30); obese I (30 to below 35); obese II (35 to below 40); and obese III (40 and over). Results showed that, 36.8 per cent of participants were classified as low-to-normal weight, 38.3 per cent were overweight, and the rest were obese.
Compared with participants, who ranked as low-to-normal weight, the overweight group was 20 per cent more likely to report pain yesterday, while the obesity-I group reported 68 per cent higher rates of pain, a number that climbed to 136 per cent and 254 per cent for obesity-II and obesity-III groups, respectively.

---