HMN 2026: How Teen pain at 18 is linked to 60% higher self-harm risk

Adolescents who report pain at the age of 18 are at higher risk of later self-harm. This is shown by a new study from Karolinska Institutet, published in Psychiatry Research. The findings suggest that pain may form part of the chain of events leading to self-harming behavior.

A new study from Karolinska Institutet has examined the association between pain symptoms and self-harm during childhood and adolescence. The researchers followed 16,948 twin pairs born in Sweden between 1992 and 2010. Participants reported pain at the ages of 9 and 18 and were subsequently followed through national registers until a maximum age of 24.

The aim was to investigate how genetic and environmental factors influence both pain and self-harm, as well as how the associations between pain and self-harming behavior develop over time. Using so-called twin models, the researchers were able to estimate how much of the variation could be explained by heredity, shared environment or individual experiences.

“We see that both genetic factors and individual environmental factors play a role in both pain and self-harm in childhood as well as adolescence,” says Jenny Rickardsson, researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.

The results also show that pain before and up to the age of 18 was associated with a higher likelihood of later self-harm. Adolescents with pain symptoms had approximately a 60% higher risk of self-harm compared with peers without pain. The association could not be explained by factors such as family environment or genetic similarity between twins.

“Our analyses suggest that pain may partly lie within the causal pathway leading to self-harming behavior, and that the association is not solely due to familial factors,” says Rickardsson.

The study further shows that the shared family environment had little impact on either pain or self-harm, while genetic factors and individual experiences accounted for a larger proportion of the variation.

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