Pain Centre Versus Arthritis

Investigating Musculoskeletal Health and Wellbeing (IMH&W) cohort

Hands of different colours and ages piled on top of each other

The Investigating Musculoskeletal Health and Wellbeing study (IMH&W) was initiated in 2018 as a prospective cohort of people with, or at risk of developing, frailty, MSK pain or disability. IMH&W aims to identify discrete subgroups and their associations to measure and characterise the development and progression of pain, frailty and disability. It provides a longitudinal context for nested research, permitting targeted recruitment of participants for qualitative, observational and interventional studies, helping to understand recruitment bias in clinical studies and providing a source cohort for cohort randomised controlled trials. Ongoing recruitment within the UK through primary and secondary care, and through non-clinical settings has reached >8800 IMH&W participants. Data are available at baseline, plus up to 3 waves of annual follow up to 2022. IMH&W has been supported through the NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre.

Available data describe:

  • demographic characteristics
  • pain severity, distribution and quality (Numerical rating scale, body manikin, McGill Pain Questionnaire)
  • Central Aspects of Pain questionnaire
  • frailty (FRAIL)
  • disability (Fried criteria and FRAIL)
  • medications
  • comorbidities
  • fracture risk

IMH&W has and continues to support recruitment and data collection for a range of qualitative and quantitative, observational and interventional research studies:

Data enquiries and requests for IMH&W should be directed to msk-recruitment@nottingham.ac.uk

View IMH&W publications

Pain Centre Versus Arthritis

Clinical Sciences Building
City Hospital
Nottingham, NG5 1PB

telephone: +44 (0) 115 823 1766 ext 31766
fax: +44 (0) 115 823 1757
email: paincentre@nottingham.ac.uk