Editorial: Pain in Early and late Life - A Call for Action

Chronic pain remains a leading cause of long-term disability (GBD 2016 Disease Injury Incidence Prevalence Collaborators, 2017), affects 20% of the world's population, imposes higher costs on the society than heart disease, cancer, and diabetes combined (GBD 2016 Disease Injury Incidence Prevalence Collaborators, 2017; Buchbinder et al., 2018), and is associated with increased mortality (Tesarz et al., 2019). Despite this global relevance, therapeutic options remain unsatisfactory to date (Williams et al., 2020). Consequently, in recent years, enormous efforts have been made to expand the knowledge about the development and maintenance of chronic pain disorders and to improve treatment options. The dramatic nature of the situation and the increasing global health burden due to chronic pain even culminated recently in a "global call for action" (Buchbinder et al., 2018).