When a clinician asks “how bad has your pain been over the past two weeks?”, they are relying on memory. Nearly all of pain medicine does.
A study from UF researchers, published in PAIN Reports in October 2025, asked how reliable that memory actually is.
What they did. Twenty-six older adults used a smartphone to record their pain, mood, and fatigue three times a day for two weeks — a method called ecological momentary assessment, which captures experience as it happens rather than in retrospect. On day 15, participants were asked to recall their average levels over that period.
What they found. The greater a person’s pain fluctuated, the less accurately they recalled it. That held even after accounting for peak pain and end pain — the two moments known from earlier research to dominate remembered experience — and after accounting for how many body areas hurt.
Strikingly, the effect was specific to pain. Recall of mood and fatigue was not distorted the same way, even though those were measured identically over the same two weeks.
Why it matters. If pain memory is systematically distorted by variability, then patients whose pain swings the most are the ones whose retrospective reports are least reliable — and those are often the patients whose pain is hardest to treat. A clinical picture assembled from recall may be least accurate exactly where accuracy matters most.
The study is small and it is a first step. But it points at something uncomfortable: one of the field’s most basic measurement tools may work least well for the people who need it most.
The work came from Ho and colleagues, including PRICE faculty Yenisel Cruz-Almeida and Stephen Coombes.
What we study:
- Pain and Aging
- Chronic Pain Risk Factors
- Pain and the Brain
- Musculoskeletal Pain
- Pain and Exercise
- Non-Medical Treatment of Pain
Prefer to talk to a person? Call 352-273-5967 or email PRICE-CTSI@ufl.edu.
UF Study ID IRB201400126
References
- Ho RLM, Warren TB, Park J, Shin YS, Petersen M, Cruz-Almeida Y, Coombes SA. Real-time and recollected ratings of pain, mood, and fatigue in older adults. Pain Rep. 2025 Oct;10(5). https://doi.org/10.1097/PR9.0000000000001326
- PRICE Research Registry recruitment materials, UF Study ID IRB201400126. IRB-approved; supplied by site owner. https://is.gd/PRICE