The DOI matches its Crossref record; 149 of the 149 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Genome-wide association study of multisite chronic pain in UK Biobank
Open accessAbstract
Chronic pain is highly prevalent worldwide and represents a significant socioeconomic and public health burden. Several aspects of chronic pain, for example back pain and a severity-related phenotype 'chronic pain grade', have been shown previously to be complex heritable traits with a polygenic component. Additional pain-related phenotypes capturing aspects of an individual's overall sensitivity to experiencing and reporting chronic pain have also been suggested as a focus for investigation. We made use of a measure of the number of sites of chronic pain in individuals within the UK general population. This measure, termed Multisite Chronic Pain (MCP), is a complex trait and its genetic architecture has not previously been investigated. To address this, we carried out a large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS) of MCP in ~380,000 UK Biobank participants. Our findings were consistent with MCP having a significant polygenic component, with a Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) heritability of 10.2%. In total 76 independent lead SNPs at 39 risk loci were associated with MCP. Additional gene-level association analyses identified neurogenesis, synaptic plasticity, nervous system development, cell-cycle progression and apoptosis genes as enriched for genetic association with MCP. Genetic correlations were observed between MCP and a range of psychiatric, autoimmune and anthropometric traits, including major depressive disorder (MDD), asthma and Body Mass Index (BMI). Furthermore, in Mendelian randomisation (MR) analyses a causal effect of MCP on MDD was observed. Additionally, a polygenic risk score (PRS) for MCP was found to significantly predict chronic widespread pain (pain all over the body), indicating the existence of genetic variants contributing to both of these pain phenotypes. Overall, our findings support the proposition that chronic pain involves a strong nervous system component with implications for our understanding of the physiology of chronic pain. These discoveries may also inform the future development of novel treatment approaches.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Gene Ontology: tool for the unification of biology
Ashburner, M., Ball, C. A., Blake, J. A., Botstein, D., Butler, H., Cherry, J. M., Davis, A. P., Dolinski, K., Dwight, S. S., Eppig, J. T., et al. (2000) · Nature Genetics · doi:10.1038/75556 · Cited by 43,206
PLINK: a tool set for whole-genome association and population-based linkage analyses.
Purcell, S., Neale, B., Todd-Brown, K., Thomas, L., Ferreira, M. A. R., Bender, D., Maller, J., Sklar, P., de Bakker, P. I. W., Daly, M. J., et al. (2007) · The American Journal of Human Genetics · doi:10.1086/519795 · Cited by 34,089
ANNOVAR: functional annotation of genetic variants from high-throughput sequencing data
Wang, K., Li, M., & Hakonarson, H. (2010) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gkq603 · Cited by 14,621
Sudlow, C., Gallacher, J., Allen, N., Beral, V., Burton, P., Danesh, J., Downey, P., Elliott, P., Green, J., Landray, M., et al. (2015) · PLOS Medicine · doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001779 · Cited by 12,728
Adipose Expression of Tumor Necrosis Factor-α: Direct Role in Obesity-Linked Insulin Resistance
Hotamisligil, G. S., Shargill, N. S., & Spiegelman, B. M. (1993) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.7678183 · Cited by 7,518
In situ click chemistry generation of cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitors
Bhardwaj, A., Kaur, J., Wuest, M., & Wuest, F. (2017) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-016-0009-6 · Cited by 7,448
Vos, T., Barber, R. M., Bell, B., Bertozzi-Villa, A., Biryukov, S., Bolliger, I., Charlson, F., Davis, A., Degenhardt, L., Dicker, D., et al. (2015) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(15)60692-4 · Cited by 6,414
LD Score regression distinguishes confounding from polygenicity in genome-wide association studies
Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, Bulik-Sullivan, B. K., Loh, P.-R., Finucane, H. K., Ripke, S., Yang, J., Patterson, N., Daly, M. J., Price, A. L., & Neale, B. M. (2015) · Nature Genetics · doi:10.1038/ng.3211 · Cited by 5,559
Mind-altering microorganisms: the impact of the gut microbiota on brain and behaviour
Cryan, J. F., & Dinan, T. G. (2012) · Nature Reviews Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nrn3346 · Cited by 4,572
Functional mapping and annotation of genetic associations with FUMA
Watanabe, K., Taskesen, E., van Bochoven, A., & Posthuma, D. (2017) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-017-01261-5 · Cited by 4,083
Cited by
Docherty, A. R., Mullins, N., Ashley-Koch, A. E., Qin, X., Coleman, J. R. I., Shabalin, A., Kang, J., Murnyak, B., Wendt, F., Adams, M., et al. (2023) · American Journal of Psychiatry · doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.21121266 · Cited by 160
Self-citationWard, J., Lyall, L. M., Bethlehem, R. A. I., Ferguson, A., Strawbridge, R. J., Lyall, D. M., Cullen, B., Graham, N., Johnston, K. J. A., Bailey, M. E. S., et al. (2019) · Translational Psychiatry · doi:10.1038/s41398-019-0635-y · Cited by 83
Self-citationChronic overlapping pain conditions and nociplastic pain
Johnston, K. J. A., Signer, R., & Huckins, L. M. (2025) · Human Genetics and Genomics Advances · doi:10.1016/j.xhgg.2024.100381 · Cited by 35
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Johnston, K. J. A., Adams, M. J., Nicholl, B. I., Ward, J., Strawbridge, R. J., Ferguson, A., McIntosh, A. M., Bailey, M. E. S., & Smith, D. J.
- Venue
- PLOS Genetics
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2019-06-13
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- e1008164
- ISSN
- 1553-7390 (ISSN-L)
- 1553-7404
- OpenAlex
- W2950439954
- Cited by
- 266
- References
- 149
- FWCI
- 10.84
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Genome-wide association study of multisite chronic pain in UK Biobank. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1371/journal.pgen.1008164
- The paper
- Johnston, K. J. A., Adams, M. J., Nicholl, B. I., Ward, J., Strawbridge, R. J., Ferguson, A., McIntosh, A. M., Bailey, M. E. S., & Smith, D. J. (2019). Genome-wide association study of multisite chronic pain in UK Biobank. PLOS Genetics. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1008164
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
