NEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Patients with chronic back pain have significant impairments in short-term prospective memory compared with people without pain, according to the findings reported in the February/March issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.Prospective memory is the memory of future intentions, such as picking up groceries or making a doctor’s appointment. Prospective memory can be triggered by a time cue, such as remembering an appointment after checking the time of day, or an event cue, seeing a mailbox and remembering that a letter needs to be posted.

Dr. Jonathan Ling, of Keele University, Staffordshire, UK, and colleagues compared the prospective memory of 50 subjects with chronic back pain to the memory of 50 subjects who were pain-free. The investigators used the Prospective Memory Questionnaire, a self-rating scale that requires users to record the number of times their prospective memory fails in a given period.