New pain study to focus on Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets
The Bangladeshi community living in Tower Hamlets are to be invited to take part in a major new study to find out whether their experience of chronic musculoskeletal pain differs from other ethnic groups living in the borough.
A research team at Barts and The London, Queen's Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry in Whitechapel has been awarded funding over two years of more than £143,000 from the Arthritis Research Campaign to carry out the study.
The team will survey a random sample of 4,000 residents in Tower Hamlets. They will collect data on the prevalence of chronic musculoskeletal pain, how it affects the lives of those affected, and how it is treated. This will allow them to compare the experience of musculoskeletal pain of the Bangladeshi population and other ethnic groups living in Tower Hamlets, one of the most deprived and ethnically diverse parts of the UK.
Study leader Martin Underwood, Professor of General Practice and Primary Care at Barts and The London, Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, who is also a part-time GP at Spitalfields Health Centre near Brick Lane, said that previous research had suggested that widespread musculoskeletal pain was commoner in South Asian population, of which the Bangladeshi community form one group, than in other cultural groups. South Asian populations living in the UK also experience poorer health-related quality of life than the white population.
Tower Hamlets is home to a 65,000-strong Bangladeshi community – the largest group outside Bangladesh. Most of the population comes from Sylhet, a rural area of northern Bangladesh and speak Sylheti, a dialect with no written form.
"We are looking at a very deprived community who are not usually studied. Few studies have been able to compare the health and social impact of musculoskeletal pain across different ethnic groups across the country," explained Professor Underwood. "It's difficult to find out how common, and serious, this problem is because South Asian people have different ways of communicating their pain to health professionals and to their families, and many of the ways of measuring pain have been developed for European and north American populations."
Many older residents, particularly older women, do not speak English. Additionally, with continued immigration, through marriage, a substantial minority of young people do not speak English. For these reasons, bilingual research staff will interview a small number of Bangladeshi patients to explore their understanding and experience of chronic widespread pain. These bilingual researchers will also produce Bengali translations of questionnaires and help participants to complete them.
Participants will be recruited from 20 GP practices in Tower Hamlets for the population survey. This will allow the study team to estimate the effects of musculoskeletal pain in a deprived inner city community and compare its impact on the Bangladeshi and white population.
"We want to find out how bad the pain is among this group of people, how it relates to ethnicity, social class, type of accommodation, and work status. Once we know the magnitude of the problem we can estimate any unmet health need and develop health programmes specifically tailored to the needs of this group," added Professor Underwood.
For more information email info@arc.org.uk.
