The objective is to describe the prevalence and nature of painful symptoms among depressive outpatients and how are they related with depressive symptoms and somatic non painful symptoms at baseline.

The FINDER study, conducted in 12 European countries in depressed outpatients in routine primary and specialist care settings provides a unique opportunity to answer these questions.

Painful symptoms were evaluated among 3468 patients enrolled by 437 investigators, using the 28-item Somatic Symptom Inventory (SSI-28) and 6 Visual Analogue Scales (1 item on overall pain and 5 items on pain characteristics: headaches, back pain, shoulder pain, interferences with daily activities and pain while awake). There was a strong correlation between the VAS overall pain score and the pain sub score of the SSI-28. The threshold score of 30 mm on the overall pain severity in combination with selected comorbidities was used to divide patients in three pain cohorts: (1) those with no/mild pain; (2) those with moderate/severe œmedically explained pain and (3) those with moderate/severe medically unexplained pain.

Results showed that 1447 (43.7%) patients had no/mild pain, 550 (16,6%) had moderate/severe medically explained pain, and 1311 (39,6%) had moderate/severe medically unexplained pain. Of the different locations of pain symptoms (from the SSI-28), headaches were the most common, followed by muscle soreness and lower back pain. The mean depression score (HADS-D) was higher in patients with pain-related symptoms.

We studied the correlations between the measures of pain and depression. These results and their implications will be discussed.