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Goulet JL, Brandt CA. Big Pain Data. Poster session presented at: Thomas R. Ten Have Annual Symposium on Statistics in Mental Health; 2014 May 29; New Haven, CT.
Pain is a common and increasing symptom throughout the world. It is also highly associated with depression and other psychiatric disorders. Pain is often measured using a 0-10 item which is typically recorded as an integer. In most samples, the distribution contains many zeroes, while scores of 1-10 are often symmetrically distributed. Thresholds are often applied to the scores (0 = No pain, 1-3 = mild, 4-6 = moderate, 7-10 = severe), reflecting clinically actionable levels of pain. We describe issues in the analysis of a cohort of over 5 million Veterans in VHA care, on which we have over 175 million data points on pain.