Links for Keyword: Pain & Touch

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Your clever body: Thinking from head to toe

by David Robson TAKE a minute out of the hustle and bustle of your busy life and sit very still. Now, place your hands on the arms of the chair or the desk in front of you, and try to focus your attention on counting your heartbeats. Can you feel a throbbing drum roll, a slight murmur or nothing at all? How does your bladder feel – is it empty or will you need to dash for the bathroom within the next half hour? You may be surprised to learn that these bodily sensations are helping you think. We tend to view the mind as an aloof, disembodied entity but it is becoming increasingly clear that the whole body is involved in the thinking process. Without input from your body, your mind would be unable to generate a sense of self or process emotions properly. Your body even plays a role in thinking about language and mathematics. And physiological sensations, such as those from your heart and bladder, influence such diverse personal attributes as the strength of your tendency to conform, your willpower and whether you are swayed by your intuitions or governed by rational thought. In the past few years, discoveries about mind-body connections have overturned the long-held view of the body as a passive vehicle driven by the brain. Instead there is more of a partnership, with bodily experiences playing an active role in your mental life. "The brain cannot act independently of the body," says Arthur Glenberg at Arizona State University in Tempe. Tune in to the body's signals, and you can exploit this to improve your creativity, memory and self-control. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 15932 - Posted: 10.22.2011

Pain underestimated by doctors for some patients

A University of Northern B.C. professor who is studying the impact of the clinician-patient relationship on how health professionals rate pain suggests it decreases if the clinician doesn't like the patient. Pain sufferers often take issue with their treatment, which is why the research is so important, said psychology professor and pain expert Ken Prkachin. "A specific complaint being 'Nobody believes me, no one is taking me seriously,"' Prkachin described in an interview. "You really get that sense when you talk to patients, maybe people are being downgraded because they're also disliked." It means people with invisible pain — such as bad backs, as opposed to broken legs — may not get adequate treatment for the problem if the doctor disregards their feelings, he said. "A good case can be made … that is going to demoralize patients and contribute to very testy patient-professional relationships," Prkachin said. Study participants consistently rated the pain of patients associated with the negative traits, such as egotism and hostility, lower than the likeable patients. "What we're trying to do is understand what's going on there and how to change that." © CBC 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 15907 - Posted: 10.13.2011

Scientists Hint at Why Laughter Feels So Good

By JAMES GORMAN Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good. The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect. His results build on a long history of scientific attempts to understand a deceptively simple and universal behavior. “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually,” Dr. Dunbar said. “That’s why we got interested in it.” And the findings fit well with a growing sense that laughter contributes to group bonding and may have been important in the evolution of highly social humans. Social laughter, Dr. Dunbar suggests, relaxed and contagious, is “grooming at a distance,” an activity that fosters closeness in a group the way one-on-one grooming, patting and delousing promote and maintain bonds between individual primates of all sorts. In five sets of studies in the laboratory and one field study at comedy performances, Dr. Dunbar and colleagues tested resistance to pain both before and after bouts of social laughter. The pain came from a freezing wine sleeve slipped over a forearm, an ever tightening blood pressure cuff or an excruciating ski exercise. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, eliminated the possibility that the pain resistance measured was the result of a general sense of well being rather than actual laughter. And, Dr. Dunbar said, they also provided a partial answer to the ageless conundrum of whether we laugh because we feel giddy or feel giddy because we laugh. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 15803 - Posted: 09.15.2011

Premature baby brains can't tell pain from touch

by Catherine de Lange Fetuses can tell the difference between pain and touch in only the last two weeks before birth, which could help to explain why babies born prematurely often have abnormal pain responses. Lorenzo Fabrizi from University College London and colleagues used EEG, a non-invasive way of measuring brain activity, on 46 newborn babies as they underwent a routine heel lance – a pinprick to the heel for taking a blood sample. They also measured how the babies' brains responded to normal touch – a light tap to the heel. Almost half of the babies were born prematurely – some at just 28 weeks – so the team were able to compare the responses of babies in the final stages of development with those of babies born at full term. Premature babies up to the age of 35 weeks had bursts of activity across the whole brain in response to both pain and touch, but a change happened around 35 weeks. Between 35 to 37 weeks – just before a fetus would normally be born – the brain seemed to become able to tell the two stimuli apart. The responses to both pain and touch now took place in specific areas on the front, back and sides of the brain, but the signal was much stronger for pain. "This is an important stage in the development of the brain," says Fabrizi, when changes occur to allow the brain to process sensory stimulation in a more sophisticated way in preparation for life outside the womb. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15785 - Posted: 09.10.2011

Gene find could lead to drug for chronic back pain

A gene responsible for chronic pain has been identified, with scientists saying this could lead to drugs for treating long-lasting back pain. Writing in the journal Science, University of Cambridge researchers removed the HCN2 gene from pain-sensitive nerves in mice. Deleting the gene stopped any chronic pain but did not affect acute pain. About one in seven people in the UK suffer from chronic pain, which can also include arthritis and headaches. The researchers say their findings open up the possibility that new drugs could be developed to block the protein produced by the HCN2 gene, which regulates chronic pain. The HCN2 gene, which is expressed in pain-sensitive nerve endings, has been known for several years, but its role in regulating pain was not understood. For the study, the researchers removed the HCN2 gene from pain-sensitive nerves. They then carried out studies using electrical stimuli on these nerves in cell cultures to determine how they were altered by the removal of HCN2. They then studied genetically modified mice in which the HCN2 gene had been deleted. By measuring the speed that the mice withdrew from different types of painful stimuli, the scientists were able to conclude that deleting the HCN2 gene abolished neuropathic pain. BBC © 2011

How your harsh reaction to horseradish may lead to new pain-managing medicines

By Ivan Amato, The next time you experience a horseradish rush — you know, those tear-jerking omigod seconds when your entire head is tsunamied by pungency from the too-big dollop of herb you just wolfed down — consider that some biologists describe your moments of agony as nothing less than a brief exposure to a natural form of tear gas. The horseradish’s primary chemical irritant, allyl isothiocyanate, stimulates the same class of chemical receptors on the same sensory cells in your mouth, throat, nose, sinuses, face and eyes as do tear gas agents and pepper spray’s capsaicin, the chemical in chili peppers that lights your mouth on fire. In recent years, scientists have been uncovering the biological mechanisms underlying these sensations. They say their discoveries could lead to new pain-managing medicines and provide insights into whether adding menthol to cigarettes makes it easier to get hooked on on them. But before we go there, it is worth looking at how and why we take notice of such chemicals at all. It comes down to this: Evolution has given animals, including us humans, some serious protective measures against harmful chemicals in the environment. Meanwhile, plants, which have been forced to be sneaky because of their inability to run away, have developed chemical defenses to prevent them from being eaten, at least by animals that don’t help spread the plants’ seeds. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 15771 - Posted: 09.08.2011

Crittervision: Heat-seeking snakes

by Caroline Williams Pythons, boas and pit vipers (the family that includes rattlesnakes) see the world pretty much as we do, but with a twist: they can "see" in infrared too. This allows them to track their prey by their body heat from up to a metre away. They do this using relatively simple organs, called pits, which lie near their nostrils. These differ slightly among different snakes but are always a small dip containing a membrane that is packed with heat-sensitive nerve endings which act as infrared receptors. The pit organs were first described in 1952 but it was only last year that the specific protein channels that react to heat were identified (Nature, vol 464, p 1006). These are found on nerve cells that are part of the sensory system that detects touch and temperature, and registers pain. Yet while this is completely separate from the visual system, both sets of information end up in the same place: a part of the brain called the optic tectum. "There, the two maps of space - visual and infrared - merge into one," says Michael Grace, a neuroscientist investigating pit viper thermal sensing at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Grace speculates that this allows the snake to see in infrared and visible light at the same time, or to switch between one and the other. When hunting in a dark burrow, for example, it can use infrared to hunt its prey and to find its way to the warmer air at the surface of the burrow, and then return to regular vision when it emerges into a hot desert day where there are few differences in temperature. The snakes may be able to use both senses at once in early morning, when there is enough light to see and it is still cool enough for its warm-blooded prey to pop out as being much hotter than their surroundings. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System; Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Link ID: 15728 - Posted: 08.27.2011

Really? The Claim: To Prevent Migraines, Drink More Water

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR For migraine sufferers, summer can be a perilous time of year. Oppressive heat and spikes in temperature have long been thought to precipitate attacks in people prone to chronic headaches. One large study in the journal Neurology even showed that the risk of migraines jumps nearly 8 percent for every nine-degree rise in temperature. But a simple step that may lower the risk, especially in warm weather, is to stay properly hydrated. Dehydration causes blood volume to drop, researchers say, resulting in less blood and oxygen flow to the brain and dilated blood vessels. Some experts suspect that a loss of electrolytes causes nerves in the brain to produce pain signals. Anyone who has ever woken up dehydrated after a night of heavy drinking knows this feeling as a hangover. But migraine sufferers may be more sensitive to the effects of dehydration. In one study, also published in Neurology, scientists recruited migraine sufferers and divided them into two groups. Those in the first group were given a placebo medication to take regularly. The others were told to drink 1.5 liters of water, or about six cups, in addition to their usual daily intake. At the end of two weeks, the researchers found that those in the water group had increased their fluid intake by just four cups a day. But on average they experienced 21 fewer hours of pain during the study period than those in the placebo group, and a decrease in the intensity of their headaches. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of Internal States
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 15684 - Posted: 08.16.2011

How Heat-Sensing Vampire Bats Home In On a Hot Meal

by Greg Miller Vampire bats must consume 70% to 80% of their body weight in blood almost every night. To satisfy this never-ending thirst, they bite their prey—typically sleeping livestock, but also the occasional human toe poking out from under the covers—in areas where warm blood courses close to the surface. Now scientists have discovered a molecular heat sensor that helps the bats home in on their dinner. Researchers led by neuroscientist David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco, searched for genes related to known molecular heat sensors in several bat species collected by colleagues in Venezuela. In the vampire bat Desmodus rotundus, the researchers found evidence of a change in how cells use the gene for an ion channel called TRPV1. This molecular pore resides on the surface of sensory neurons, and in other animals it stimulates the neurons in response to painful heat or capsaicin, the compound that gives chili peppers their sting. In Desmodus, neurons in the nerve connected to the small heat-sensing pits near the bat's nose splice together different parts of the Trpv1 gene to produce a version of the ion channel that's shorter at one end than the version made by other animals, including bats that feed on fruit, nectar, or insects, the team reports in tomorrow's Nature. To investigate the workings of the shorter TRPV1 channel, Julius and colleagues inserted the genetic instructions into frog egg cells, causing the cells to make the channels and stick them on their surface. Probing the egg cells with electrodes, the researchers discovered that the short version of TRPV1 opens at about 31˚C, which in a neuron would increase firing. That's well below the 40˚C or higher threshold for the long version of TRPV1. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dolphin may sense the body electric

By Nadia Drake Fleeing fish beware: The Guiana dolphin has a super Spidey sense. But instead of danger, the dolphin detects faint electrical fields generated by such things as contracting muscles, a beating heart and pumping gills — telltale signs of potential prey. The dolphin is the first true mammal with these super sensory powers, scientists report. It detects electrical fields using organs on its snout that were once considered simple remnants of long-lost whiskers. Electroreception — the ability to sense these bioelectric fields — has already been described in sharks, amphibians, fish and some egg-laying mammals. “We were really surprised to find this in the dolphin. Nobody had expected it,” says sensory biologist Wolf Hanke of the University of Rostock in Germany. Hanke and his team first suspected the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia guianensis) had electropowers based on the size of organs called vibrissal crypts on its snout. Earlier work suggested the crypts, shaped like pits, have a rich blood supply. “We thought they must have some function — they were pretty big — and otherwise would have disappeared during evolution,” Hanke says of the crypts. When the team considered the dolphins’ lifestyle, the idea became even more plausible. Scientists think the dolphins, which live off the eastern edge of Central and South America, are benthic feeders, gulping fish from the seafloor. The resulting plumes of sediment can limit visibility and echolocation, meaning a different way of detecting prey would be especially helpful. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Migraine Miseries Push Patients to Ways of Coping

By TARA PARKER-POPE The news that the presidential candidate Michele Bachmann suffers from severe migraines has touched off a national discussion about a surprisingly common disorder that is little understood and often undertreated. Migraine patients are coming forward with their stories. And while each one is different, they have two common threads: suffering and trying to cope. For some, a migraine represents throbbing head pain and nausea so severe they retreat to a darkened room for a day or more. For others, it’s about a scary moment, driving on the highway when a migraine-induced aura or vision change forces them to pull over. “Imagine someone having driven a nail straight through your head,” said Craig Partridge, 50, chief scientist for a high-tech research company in East Lansing, Mich., who began having migraines in his late teens. “And then they periodically tap on it to remind you it’s there. It’s that painful.” More than 10 percent of adults and children suffer from migraine — which is three times as common in women and girls as in men and boys — and the Migraine Research Foundation reports that nearly a quarter of households are affected. The World Health Organization ranks migraine among the top 20 most debilitating health conditions; more than 90 percent of sufferers are unable to work or function normally during an attack, which can last for hours or even days. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Giving Chronic Pain a Medical Platform of Its Own

By TARA PARKER-POPE Most doctors view pain as a symptom of an underlying problem — treat the disease or the injury, and the pain goes away. But for large numbers of patients, the pain never goes away. In a sweeping review issued last month, the Institute of Medicine — the medical branch of the National Academy of Sciences — estimated that chronic pain afflicts 116 million Americans, far more than previously believed. The toll documented in the report is staggering. Childbirth, for example, is a common source of chronic pain: The institute found that 18 percent of women who have Caesarean deliveries and 10 percent who have vaginal deliveries report still being in pain a year later. Ten percent to 50 percent of surgical patients who have pain after surgery go on to develop chronic pain, depending on the procedure, and for as many as 10 percent of those patients, the chronic postoperative pain is severe. (About 1 in 4 Americans suffer from frequent lower back pain.) The risk of suicide is high among chronic pain patients. Two studies found that about 5 percent of those with musculoskeletal pain had tried to kill themselves; among patients with chronic abdominal pain, the number was 14 percent. “Before, we didn’t have good data on what is the burden of pain in our society,” said Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of pain management at the Stanford School of Medicine and a member of the committee that produced the report. “The number of people is more than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Drive to Stem Shingles Meets Few Expectations

By PAULA SPAN Five years have passed since the Food and Drug Administration approved a vaccine against shingles. By now, experts had expected a substantial proportion of people older than 60, the most vulnerable population, to be protected from outbreaks of this nasty viral disease and the persistent, debilitating pain it can leave behind. Indeed, the vaccine, called Zostavax, could so sharply reduce the number of adults who suffer from shingles — currently more than one million a year — that in March, the Food and Drug Administration approved its use by those ages 50 and older. But even with this weapon at the ready, the campaign against shingles has bogged down. Some experts say it never really got under way. A combination of factors has dissuaded many physicians’ offices and clinics from carrying Zostavax. And its manufacturer, Merck, has been unable to produce sufficient quantities to meet even modest demand. Intermittent shortages that last months have kept the company from consistently marketing the vaccine and have forestalled public health campaigns that could have built awareness of the need for it. “It really, really has been frustrating,” said Dr. Rafael Harpaz, an epidemiologist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “There hasn’t been a single year since the vaccine was licensed in 2006 that there’s been no problem with supply.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Clue to pain of sunburn discovered by UK researchers

A chemical in the body that triggers pain from sunburn has been pinpointed by UK experts in a discovery that could lead to new painkillers. Scientists hope one day to be able to knock out the substance with drugs, helping people who suffer from chronic pain. Tests on volunteers showed CXCL5, as it is called, is produced when skin is burnt by UV rays from the sun. The research is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Exposure to ultraviolet light from sunlight causes premature skin ageing, cancer and other skin changes. UVB affects the outer layer of skin, and is the main agent responsible for sunburn. In the study, scientists at King's College London exposed small patches of the 10 volunteers' skin to UVB. Areas of sunburn were produced which became increasingly tender over a few days. The scientists took small samples of sunburnt skin and screened them for hundreds of known pain molecules. They discovered unusually high levels of CXCL5. BBC © 2011

New Report Details Uphill Battle to Solve the U.S.'s Pain Problem

By Bob Roehr Chronic pain affects at least one in three adults in the U.S., which is more than the sum total of those with heart disease, cancer and diabetes combined. For many of these 116 million Americans, their pain is severe and eludes available treatments. In addition to the human suffering, the monetary cost of medical treatment and lost productivity has reached $635 billion a year. The U.S. needs "a cultural transformation" in the way we view pain, treat it and conduct research on its causes and treatments, says a new report released June 29 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Pain can be protective. Acute pain tells us to pull a finger back from a hot stove, stop walking on a blistered foot or allow a fevered body to rest. It is a warning that bodily injury needs attention and time to heal. But when the pain signal continues for an extended period, "it can become a disease in its own right," Philip Pizzo, dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine and chair of the committee that wrote the IOM report said at the news conference where the report was released. Pain can actually rewire nerve and brain pathways. In much the same way that memories are created, it can become a self-perpetuating loop that continues to feed back on itself long after the original cause for the pain has resolved. Chronic pain can shrink the volume of the brain's gray matter, the portion of the brain devoted to thought. Researchers speculate that this decrease results in part from a limited pattern of stimulation of circuits that are preoccupied with a continuous pain loop that crowds out other activity. In addition to that, continuously stimulating the pathway releases more of the neurotransmitter glutamate, an excess of which can be toxic. © 2011 Scientific American,

LSD Alleviates 'Suicide Headaches'

by Kai Kupferschmidt BERLIN—Patients suffering from the agony of cluster headaches will take anything to dull the pain, even LSD, it turns out. Results from a pilot study presented here on Saturday at the International Headache Congress reveal that six patients treated with 2-bromo-LSD, a nonhallucinogenic analog of LSD, showed a significant reduction in cluster headaches per day; some were free of the attacks for weeks or months. "Some of these patients are still reporting significant relief more than a year after they were treated with the compound," says John Halpern, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in Boston and one of the investigators involved in the study. "Nobody has ever reported these kinds of results." Cluster headaches, sometimes referred to as "suicide headaches" because of the almost unbearable pain they cause sufferers, usually involve just one side of the face; patients often liken the pain to someone trying to pull their eye out for hours. They can occur in bouts lasting many weeks, with several attacks a day. "What causes these attacks is still not clear," says Peter Goadsby, a headache expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who is not connected with the research. But recent studies suggest that changes in the structure of the hypothalamus are involved. Because that part of the brain is responsible for, among other things, circadian rhythms, the daily cycle of our body that dictates when we sleep but also regulates body temperature and blood pressure, it could explain the periodicity of attacks and why they seem to occur particularly often around the solstices. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Muscles play a part in the rubber hand illusion

by Wendy Zukerman People with an anaesthetised finger can be convinced that a plastic finger is their own, in a modified version of the famous "rubber hand illusion". This suggests that the sense of touch is not essential to conjure up the illusion, as our muscles and nerves also play a role. Over 10 years ago, psychologists found they could convince people a rubber hand was theirs by putting a fake hand on a table in front of them and stroking the rubber hand and the person's own hand at the same time. More than just a party trick, the illusion revealed how easily our sense of ownership over our body can be manipulatedMovie Camera. This is important, because disowning a healthy arm or a leg is common in people who have had a stroke or have schizophrenia. Understanding exactly what causes our perception of body ownership should help develop treatments. The illusion was thought to be induced by a mismatch of information from our eyes and sense of touch. But Lee Walsh from Neuroscience Research Australia in Sydney suspects that our sense of body position, called proprioception, also plays a part. To find out, Walsh and colleagues injected a local anaesthetic into one index finger of 30 people to deaden the finger's sense of touch. The participants could still sense the finger's movement and position, however, as the nerves that send this information to the brain start in the hand and arm muscles, which were not affected by the anaesthetic. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

How the Brain Recognizes Its Body

by Dani Cooper, ABC Science Online The mystery of how the brain develops the sense of ownership that recognizes our body belongs to us is a step closer to being solved. Australian researchers have shown that along with the sense of touch and vision, signalling receptors in the muscles and joints also play a critical role. The finding, published recently in the Journal of Physiology, will help in designing treatments for disorders of body ownership that can occur with conditions such as stroke and epilepsy. Lead author Lee Walsh, of Neuroscience Research Australia, explained we instinctively know our body parts "belong" to us. However, how the brain develops that map of what belongs to it is still in part unknown. "How do I know my hand is mine and not yours and that the telephone is not a part of my body," he said. Previous research shows people can be deluded into claiming ownership of an artificial hand. This is done by simultaneously stroking the subject's hidden hand and a visible artificial rubber hand. "Once the illusion of ownership of the hand is established, subjects have physiological responses to threats made against the rubber hand," Walsh and his colleagues wrote in the paper. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

A Tiny Key to a Terrible Lock

by Carl Zimmer; For tens of millions of Americans, pain is not just an occasional  nuisance—a stubbed toe, a paper cut—but a constant and torturous companion. Chronic pain can be focused on an arthritic knee or a bad back, diffused throughout the body, or even located virtually in an amputated limb. It can linger for years. And it can transform the world so that merely the light brush of a finger is an agonizing experience. The daily devastation can be so intense that people with chronic pain are up to six times as likely as those who are pain-free to report suicidal thoughts. Despite the toll, chronic pain has been relatively neglected by  doctors. Perhaps that’s because it seems less real to them than other, more tangible medical disorders. With no equivalent of a stethoscope  or thermometer to measure pain objectively, they have had to rely  entirely on their patients’ testimony. As neuroscientists learn more about the biological basis of pain, the situation is finally beginning to change. Most remarkably, unfolding research shows that chronic pain can cause concrete, physiological changes in the brain. After several months of chronic pain, a person’s brain begins to shrink. The longer people suffer, the more gray matter they lose. With that bad news, though, comes a message of hope. In documenting the damage that chronic pain causes, neuroscientists are also beginning to decipher how it comes to exist in the first place. Those insights suggest better treatments and cures. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Back pain relief linked to anatomical changes in brain

By Christian Torres, When you’re in constant pain, it can be hard to think of anything else. The pain clouds your thoughts like a fog, wearing away at your patience and your attention. New research, however, suggests that when relief does finally come, your brain can recover all the way down to a cellular level. A report in the May 18 Journal of Neuroscience finds that relieving chronic lower back pain correlates with a return to normal brain function. Fourteen patients performed a cognitive task before and after one of two treatments, either spinal surgery or an injection of anesthesia between spinal joints. The cognitive task, which tested patients’ ability to focus, involved picking out which of three numbers or letters didn’t belong in a group. Among those who felt pain relief after treatment, neural activity during the task improved to healthy levels in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with attention. More striking, the cortex had actually become thicker, attaining a thickness similar to that of healthy individuals. Previous research has suggested that chronic pain leads to a loss in volume of gray matter, and potentially function,in several brain regions. Laura Stone, lead author of the current study and a researcher at McGill University, said she expected a slowdown, not a reversal, of these kinds of losses. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is a particularly interesting area because it’s also associated with decision-making, anxiety, depression and emotion. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

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